Everybody HasTo Be Involved In Project Africa.

Malcolm X, Malcolm el Shabazz had been murdered in Mexico.

Fri, 10 May 2013 07:10:00 +0000

Malcolm X, Malcolm el Shabazz had been murdered in Mexico. Initially I heard it was Mexico City but published reports are stating it was in Tijuana.. I doubled checked and hear it was actually Mexico City.. In either case the word was he was robbed, shot and tossed off a roof..I’m at a loss for words..I can only imagine what his family is going through.. The father of two was a good man destined to do great things..

Below is a link to give you crucial details as to what went down with Malcolm http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/05/malcolm-xs-grandson-killed-in-mexico-city.php

I met Malcolm a few years back when he was attending school here in the Bay Area and would frequent our radio station.. He was pretty open, candid and someone who had grown and was continuing to grow spiritually and politically..He was someone who we started to see traveling a lot.. he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and later he went to Libya and then Syria..He was definitely getting an international perspective on things..

Here’s a couple of interviews he did at KPFA on the Block Report w/ JR and HKR (Hard Knock Radio )that can give you some insight as to who he was and what he was about..

http://sfbayview.com/2010/the-legacy-of-el-hajj-malik-el-shabazz-lives-an-interview-wit-his-grandson-malcolm-shabazz/

http://sfbayview.com/2010/mumia-the-media-and-more-davey-d-moi-jr-and-malcolm-shabazz-on-hard-knock-radio/

http://www.blockreportradio.com/news-mainmenu-26/1000-live-from-saudi-arabia-an-interview-with-el-hajj-malcolm-shabazz.html

http://www.blockreportradio.com/radio-mainmenu-27/1316-hajj-malcolm-shabazz-speaks-on-the-legacy-of-martin-luther-king-jr.html

Earlier this year many of us were alarmed when we heard reports that Malcolm Shabazz had been detained by the FBI and was holed up somewhere for a couple of days with no rhyme or reason given as to how and why..he later issued a statement explaining his ordeal.. You can read that below..That in itself is harrowing and should be cause for alarm..

“I sincerely appreciate the care & concern of the People over my well-being after Press TV’s report of the most recent events which have transpired regarding the F.B.I.’s harassment of me.

Given the storm of lies, and half-truths that come with being associated with being the descendant of El Hajj Malik el Shabazz, also known as Minister Malcolm X, any and everything that I do; great or small, good or not so good, real or imagined is subject to controversy. However, in this missive I will take this opportunity to properly & fully disclose what transpired.

In the beginning of 2012 I had been informed that I was under investigation by the F.B.I.’s Counter Terrorism Task Force Unit located in Goshen, N.Y.

The agents of this division-and in collaboration with others-have visited several residences of which I was known by them to frequent. However, they would never come when they knew me to actually be there. They would leave their cards with the residents asking them to tell me to call them, and then would tell surrounding residents to observe the house and to notify them if they saw me.

These are the homes of long-time friends, and very close supporters. Yet, when federal agents begin knocking on someone’s door on multiple occasions to snoop, and ask questions, whether one is guilty of an offense or not, it’s enough to coerce people into distancing themselves from you. This cheap tactic employed by the F.B.I. is a means of agitation & harassment. They seek to neutralize my networking abilities.

They have visited locations in California, Chicago, Miami and most aggressively in New York.

People were advising me that if I had nothing to hide, then I should just contact them as requested and cooperate. Though I must say that in these kind of matters I am of a particular ethic. For one, I have been engaged in no criminal activity of their concern, and they could have located me if they so chose. Secondly, I don’t recognize the authority in them beckoning me.

It wasn’t even until my mother informed me that they had been contacting her that I truly became agitated. She advised me to see what they had to say, and so I obliged the next time they came around looking for me. My encounter was with 2 federal agents of Goshen, N.Y.’s Counter Terrorism Task Foci Unit. The primary agent identified himself as Special Agent Tom Brozicky.

They expressed concern over-as they put it-my “international travels”; I have lived & studied in Damascus, Syria for over a year, and now the U.S. is instigating conflict within the very same region; I went on ex-congresswoman/former presidential candidate Cynthia Mckinney’s delegation along with Dr. Randy Short to Libya, and met with Leader Muammar Gadhafi one week prior to N.A.T.O. intervention and I was most recently getting ready to travel to Tehran, Iran to be a participant of the International Fajr Film Festival and give a lecture addressing the issues of Hollywood and violence:

- Modern Violence & Terrorism,

- Provoking clashes between religions & populations

I was picked up by authorities after I filed for a visa to Iran, and 2 days prior to my departure. A detective squad from the City of Middletown Police Department surrounded me in the street about 2 blocks from where I was residing. They asked me my name, and I gave them an alias, but they were already well aware of who I actually was. I didn’t tell them my real name because I didn’t know what was going on. When I was brought before a Judge of City of Middletown court I was surprised to be informed that I was being charged with Grand Larceny, and False Impersonation charge. Then I was sent to jail, and told to appear again 7 days later. Then following court date the bogus charge of Grand Larceny, which they only put to justify stopping me in first place, was dropped. And they left me to face the False Impersonation. I was offered 90 days for the offense of giving the authorities the wrong name which I declined before bailing out after 2 weeks.

When I was being held within the belly of the beast on trumped up charges, to my rescue came the journalist at Press TV based in Iran. My relationship with powerful & progressive news outfit began in April of 2012, and prior to that I had discussions with their journalist regarding current events internationally. I developed a positive rapport with some of them, and as a result was invited to travel to Iran to discuss the impact of Hollywood in stereotyping Muslims, Iranians and African people. From January 15th through 18th, 2013, I was a featured interviewee for the Press TV documentary “The Façade of the American Dream”. And prior to my date of departure to Iran, Lifetime television released a television bio-picture called “Betty & Coretta” which was a sensationalistic misrepresentation of my grandparents, my mother and me. This film aside from being poorly acted, and shallow in depth also threatened to inflame old controversies, and open unhealed wounds and to remind the public of sad outcomes without ever identifying B.O.S.S.I., the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other forces that set the climate for my grandfather’s assassination, and made my family a long-suffering casualty of COINTELPRO, and other anti-Black repression programs. Naturally, anything done to stir up old hatred of The Shabazz Family will impact me as the name-sake, and first male heir of Malcolm X, and whether I am high or low in fortunes does not exempt me from this reality.

The formula for a public assassination is: the character assassination before the physical assassination; so one has to be made killable before the eyes of the public in order for their eventual murder to then deemed justifiable. And when the time arrives for these hits to be carried out you’re not going to see a C.I.A. agent with a suit & tie, and a badge that says “C.I.A.” walk up to someone, and pull the trigger. What they will do is to out-source to local police departments in the region of their target, and to employ those that look like the target of interest to infiltrate the workings in order to set up the environment for the eventual assassination (character, physical/incarceration, exile) to take place.

For several months prior to my arrest in late January, 2013 I faced a pattern of harassment from law enforcement which is usually reserved for important figures. On Thursday, November 1, 2012 @ 11:53pm in the park circle area of Middletown, N.Y. I was stopped by officers of the Middletown Police Department, and given a ticket for “J-Walking” (crossing in the middle of the street), which then escalated into a “Disorderly Conduct” supposedly because of the exchange of words that I had with the officers. I told them that they couldn’t possibly be serious for writing me a “J-Walking ticket”, that I didn’t appreciate how they were treating me and that they shouldn’t be looking at me as less of a man because they were in police uniform. For this I was arrested, the officers stole the little amount of money that I had on me, they then stripped me and threw me in a freezing precinct cell for the remainder of that early morning. I was finally taken before the “Judge Steven Brockett” around 1:30pm. He gave me an unreasonable bail, and then ordered that I be remanded to the Orange county Jail.

This penalty may seem a bit extreme or harsh to most of you, but here is where it gets worse: On Tuesday, October 30th, exactly 2 nights prior to this incident, the same officer “J Berman” who wrote me the ticket for “J-Walking” & “Disorderly Conduct” stopped me coming from out of a store in the same area, and questioned me as to what I was doing.

I told him that I was coming out of the store. He asked to see what I bought which was a pack of sun flower seeds. I had actually just so happened to be eating a few while he was talking to me, and I spit one of the shells on the ground. At this point officer “J Berman” threatened to write me a ticket for littering. Needless to say, I was dumbfounded, but I went home that night.

Yet, it still doesn’t even begin there. I had an encounter with other officers of the Midletown Police Department one week prior to officer “J Berman’s” threats to write me a ticket for spitting a sun flower seed on the ground: I was coming out of a restaurant with my mother, and her friend. As the 3 of us entered the car to leave 2 police cars converged on our vehicle, and boxed us in. My mother was petrified. With guns drawn I was then ordered to step out of the back seat. I asked them why to which they replied that I had several warrants for my arrest. I told them that they were mistaken, but I still complied with their request. Humiliated in front of all on-lookers I was then thrown on the car while the officers ripped through my pockets. After they were done they said that it was my lucky day because I actually didn’t have any warrants at all, and so I was free to go! One of these officer’s name was “R. Ribeiro”…

You may wonder if it could possibly get any worse than this. Well, it does! Approximately 3 weeks prior to the public humiliation of my mother, and me by “R Ribeiro” and another officer of the Middletown Police Department I found myself subject to the discrimination & prejudice of Mayor Joseph M. Destefano of Middletown, N.Y. himself. A friend, and I went out to eat at a restaurant in Middletown, N.Y. which is owned by the Mayor, and to our surprise he appeared from nowhere and asked us to leave. When we inquired as to why he stated that officials of the Middletown Police Department told him not to let us patronize his establishment. Mind you that this goes without incident.

As I stand for the people, God-Willing, I would pray that the same people wouldn’t hesitate to stand for me. If these unjust & heinous actions are tolerated & allowed to be done to me without recourse, then no one is safe. Just as Huewy P Newton of the Black Panther Party stated that police are in the white community to protect & serve, yet occupy ours like a foreign troop… I tell you that we shouldn’t fall victim to the conditioning of feeling inferior or fearful at the presence of law enforcement for no apparent reason.

With that being said, I was not arrested by federal agents. I was taken in by a squad from the City of Middletown, N.Y.’s Police Department. I was not being held in an “undisclosed location” so to speak. I was actually being held in the Orange County Jail in Goshen, N.Y. However, from the time that I was booked at the precinct, to standing before a Judge the next day who told me to come back in 7 more, to being processed at the Orange County Jail and up until 7 days later I was not permitted to make any calls to notify anyone of my status; as though I had just been kidnapped from of the street.

http://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/rip-malcolm-shabazz-grandson-of-malcolm-x-robbed-killed-in-mexico/

Unfortunately, until this day my family hasn’t been fully abreast of my situation as I haven’t had the opportunity to properly consult with any of them. Dr. Randy Short who notified Press TV of my situation is a close comrade of mine who was on our delegation in Libya. Media reports from Press TV about my situation were not intended to create controversy. In reality, I have a few associates that are affiliated with this reputable International media outlet, and they had expected to meet with me in Iran. So when I disappeared, and rumors spread, the inability to get concise information from a credible source prompted them to rouse public attention on my behalf, for which I am grateful. In April of 2012 I had the opportunity to be a guest analyst/contributor on Press TV. This network has a large following all over the world, and millions find it’s news, documentaries and programming to be both an educational, and insightful alternative to the conglomerated, and highly biased mainstream American & British news media. Regarding the Source magazine, nothing that they published was vetted by me, and was made by persons, at best, vaguely familiar with my situation. Further, I have never had an affiliation or relationship with The Source, nor have they ever directly consulted with me about anything.”

Blacks are murdered with impunity in US, Malcolm X's grandson says

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OiOj5y2yLI

FBI arrests Malcolm X grandson en route to Iran

The grandson of the late African-American civil rights leader Malcolm X has been arrested by FBI agents on his way to Iran, Press TV reports.

Muslim civil activist Malcolm Shabazz was reportedly arrested before starting his scheduled visit to Tehran to attend a conference on Hollywoodism, sources outside the United States confirmed on Monday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has refused to provide any information about his whereabouts.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/02/04/287235/fbi-stops-malcolm-x-grandson-trip-to-iran/

A Message to My Sistas by Assata Shakur

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:00:00 +0000

A Message to My Sistas

by Assata Shakur

At this time I'd like to say a few words especially to my sisters: SISTERS. BLACK PEOPLE WILL NEVER BE FREE UNLESS BLACK WOMEN PARTICIPATE IN EVERY ASPECT OF OUR STRUGGLE, ON EVERY LEVEL OF OUR STRUGGLE. I think that Black women, more than anybody on the face of the earth, recognize the urgency of our situation.

Because it is We who come face to face daily with the institutions of our oppression. And because it is We who have borne the major responsibility of raising our children. And it is We who have to deal with the welfare systems that do not care about the welfare of our children. And it is We who have to deal with the school systems that do not educate our children. It is We who have to deal with the racist teachers who teach our children to hate themselves. It is We who have seen the terrible effects of racism on our children.

I JUST WANT TO TAKE A MOMENT OUT TO EXPRESS MY LOVE TO ALL OF YOU WHO RISK YOUR LIVES DAILY STRUGGLING OUT HERE ON THE FRONT LINES. We who have watched our young grow too old, too soon. We who have watched our children come home angry and frustrated and seen them grow more bitter, more disillusioned with the passing of each day. And We who have seen the sick, trapped look on the faces of our children when they come to fully realize what it means to be Black in Amerikkka. And we know what deprivation is.

How many times have We run out of bus fare, rent money, food money and how many times have our children gone to school in hand-me-down clothes, with holes in their shoes. We know what a hell-hole Amerikkka is. We're afraid to let our children go out and play. We're afraid to walk the streets at night. We sisters, We have seen our young, the babies that We brought into this world with such great hopes for, We have seen their bodies bloated and aching from drugs, scarred and deformed by bullet holes. We know what oppression is. We have been abused in every way imaginable. We have been abused economically, politically. We have been abused physically, and We have been abused sexually. And sisters, We have a long and glorious history of struggle on this land/planet.

Afrikan women were strong and courageous warriors long before We came to this country in chains. And here in Amerikkka, our sisters have been on the front lines. Sister Harriet Tubman led the underground railroad. And sisters like Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hammer, Sandra Pratt and our Queen Mother Moore have carried it on. Sisters, We have been the backbone of our communities, and We have got to be the backbone of our nation. We have got to build strong family units, based on love and struggle. We don't have no time to play around.

A REVOLUTIONARY WOMAN CAN'T HAVE NO REACTIONARY MAN.

If he's not about liberation, if he's not about struggle, if he ain't about building a strong Black nation then he ain't about nothing. We know how to struggle. We know how to struggle and finagle to survive. We know what it means, sisters, to struggle tooth and nail. We know what it means to struggle with love. We know what unity is. We know what sisterhood is. We have always been kind to each other, brought each other hot soup and biscuits. We have always helped each other through the hard times. Sisters, We must celebrate Afrikan womanhood. We don't want to be like Miss Ann. She can keep her false eyelashes and her false, despoiled image of womanhood. She can keep her mink stole and her French provincial furniture. We will define for ourselves what womanhood is. And We will create our own style and our own ways of dress. We can't have no white man in France telling Afrikan women what to look like. We will create our own New Afrikan way of living. We will create our own way of being and living our own New Afrikan culture, taking the best of the old and mixing it with the new.

SISTERS WE HAVE GOT TO TAKE CONTROL OF OUR LIVES AND OUR FUTURE WHEREVER WE ARE. AND WE HAVE GOT TO ORGANIZE OURSELVES INTO A STRONG BODY OF AFRIKAN WOMEN.

No One Can Stop The Rain

(A poem by Assata Shakur)

Watch, the grass is growing.

Watch, but don't make it obvious.

Let your eyes roam casually, but watch! In any prison yard, you can see it - growing.

In the cracks, in the crevices, between the steel and the concrete,

out of the dead gray dust,

the bravest blades of grass shoot up,

bold and full of life.

Watch. the grass is growing.

It is growing through the cracks.

The guards say grass is against the Law.

Grass is contraband in prison.

The guards say that the grass is insolent.

It is uppity grass, radical grass, militant grass, terrorist grass, they call it weeds.

Nasty weeds, nigga weeds, dirty, spic, savage indian, wetback, pinko, commie weeds - subversive! And so the guards try to wipe out the grass.

They yank it from its roots. They poison it with drugs. They maul it, They rake it.

Blades of grass have been found hanging in cells,

covered with bruises. "apparent suicides

The guards say that the GRASS IS UNAUTHORIZED DO NOT LET THE GRASS GROW.

You can spy on the grass. You can lock up the grass.

You can mow it down, temporarily.

But you will never keep it from growing.

Watch, the grass is beautiful.

The guards try to mow it down, but it keeps on growing.

The grass grows into a poem.

The grass grows into a song. The grass paints itself across the canvas of life.

And the picture is clear and the lyrics are true, and the haunting voices sing so sweet and strong that the people hear the grass from far away.

And the people start to dance, and the people start to sing, and the song is freedom.

Watch, the grass is growing.

Assata Shakur

An Open Letter From Assata.

Sun, 05 May 2013 16:15:00 +0000

My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy towards people of color. I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984.

I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the U.S. government has done everything in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one. In the 1960s, I participated in various struggles: the black liberation movement, the student rights movement, and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. I joined the Black Panther Party. By 1969 the Black Panther Party had become the number one organization targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. Because the Black Panther Party demanded the total liberation of black people, J. Edgar Hoover called it “greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and vowed to destroy it and its leaders and activists.

I was falsely accused in six different “criminal cases” and in all six of these cases I was eventually acquitted or the charges were dismissed. The fact that I was acquitted or that the charges were dismissed, did not mean that I received justice in the courts, that was certainly not the case. It only meant that the “evidence” presented against me was so flimsy and false that my innocence became evident. This political persecution was part and parcel of the government’s policy of eliminating political opponents by charging them with crimes and arresting them with no regard to the factual basis of such charges.

On May 2, 1973 I, along with Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, supposedly for a “faulty tail light.” Sundiata Acoli got out of the car to determine why we were stopped. Zayd and I remained in the car. State trooper Harper then came to the car, opened the door and began to question us. Because we were black, and riding in a car with Vermont license plates, he claimed he became “suspicious.” He then drew his gun, pointed it at us, and told us to put our hands up in the air, in front of us, where he could see them. I complied and in a split second, there was a sound that came from outside the car, there was a sudden movement, and I was shot once with my arms held up in the air, and then once again from the back. Zayd Malik Shakur was later killed, trooper Werner Foerster was killed, and even though trooper Harper admitted that he shot and killed Zayd Malik Shakur, under the New Jersey felony murder law, I was charged with killing both Zayd Malik Shakur, who was my closest friend and comrade, and charged in the death of trooper Forester. Never in my life have I felt such grief. Zayd had vowed to protect me, and to help me to get to a safe place, and it was clear that he had lost his life, trying to protect both me and Sundiata. Although he was also unarmed, and the gun that killed trooper Foerster was found under Zayd’s leg, Sundiata Acoli, who was captured later, was also charged with both deaths. Neither Sundiata Acoli nor I ever received a fair trial We were both convicted in the news media way before our trials. No news media was ever permitted to interview us, although the New Jersey police and the FBI fed stories to the press on a daily basis. In 1977, I was convicted by an all- white jury and sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison. In 1979, fearing that I would be murdered in prison, and knowing that I would never receive any justice, I was liberated from prison, aided by committed comrades who understood the depths of the injustices in my case, and who were also extremely fearful for my life.

The U.S. Senate’s 1976 Church Commission report on intelligence operations inside the USA, revealed that “The FBI has attempted covertly to influence the public’s perception of persons and organizations by disseminating derogatory information to the press, either anonymously or through “friendly” news contacts.” This same policy is evidently still very much in effect today.

On December 24, 1997, The New Jersey State called a press conference to announce that New Jersey State Police had written a letter to Pope John Paul II asking him to intervene on their behalf and to aid in having me extradited back to New Jersey prisons. The New Jersey State Police refused to make their letter public. Knowing that they had probably totally distort the facts, and attempted to get the Pope to do the devils work in the name of religion, I decided to write the Pope to inform him about the reality of’ “justice” for black people in the State of New Jersey and in the United States. (See attached Letter to the Pope).

In January of 1998, during the pope’s visit to Cuba, I agreed to do an interview with NBC journalist Ralph Penza around my letter to the Pope, about my experiences in New Jersey court system, and about the changes I saw in the United States and it’s treatment of Black people in the last 25 years. I agreed to do this interview because I saw this secret letter to the Pope as a vicious, vulgar, publicity maneuver on the part of the New Jersey State Police, and as a cynical attempt to manipulate Pope John Paul II. I have lived in Cuba for many years, and was completely out of touch with the sensationalist, dishonest, nature of the establishment media today. It is worse today than it was 30 years ago. After years of being victimized by the “establishment” media it was naive of me to hope that I might finally get the opportunity to tell “my side of the story.” Instead of an interview with me, what took place was a “staged media event” in three parts, full of distortions, inaccuracies and outright lies. NBC purposely misrepresented the facts. Not only did NBC spend thousands of dollars promoting this “exclusive interview series” on NBC, they also spent a great deal of money advertising this “exclusive interview” on black radio stations and also placed notices in local newspapers.

Like most poor and oppressed people in the United States, I do not have a voice. Black people, poor people in the U.S. have no real freedom of speech, no real freedom of expression and very little freedom of the press. The black press and the progressive media has historically played an essential role in the struggle for social justice. We need to continue and to expand that tradition. We need to create media outlets that help to educate our people and our children, and not annihilate their minds. I am only one woman. I own no TV stations, or Radio Stations or Newspapers. But I feel that people need to be educated as to what is going on, and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression in Amerika. All I have is my voice, my spirit and the will to tell the truth. But I sincerely ask, those of you in the Black media, those of you in the progressive media, those of you who believe in truth freedom, To publish this statement and to let people know what is happening. We have no voice, so you must be the voice of the voiceless.

Free all Political Prisoners, I send you Love and Revolutionary Greetings From Cuba, One of the Largest, Most Resistant and Most Courageous Palenques (Maroon Camps) That has ever existed on the Face of this Planet.

Assata Shakur Havana, Cuba

In 1978, my case was one of many cases bought before the United Nations Organization in a petition filed by the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, exposing the existence of political prisoners in the United States, their political persecution, and the cruel and inhuman treatment they receive in US prisons. According to the report:

‘The FBI and the New York Police Department in particular, charged and accused Assata Shakur of participating in attacks on law enforcement personnel and widely circulated such charges and accusations among police agencies and units. The FBI and the NYPD further charged her as being a leader of the Black Liberation Army which the government and its respective agencies described as an organization engaged in the shooting of police officers. This description of the Black Liberation Army and the accusation of Assata Shakur’s relationship to it was widely circulated by government agents among police agencies and units. As a result of these activities by the government, Ms. Shakur became a hunted person; posters in police precincts and banks described her as being involved in serious criminal activities; she was highlighted on the FBI’s most wanted list; and to police at all levels she became a ‘shoot-to-kill’ target.”

Honoring Huey Newton and Young Panthers February 17, 1942 August 22, 1989

Sat, 04 May 2013 07:55:00 +0000

Honoring Huey Newton and Young Panthers

February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989

Black is really beautiful!

"You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution." --Huey Newton

Huey Newton was a Black American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966. Newton had a long series of confrontations with law enforcement, including several convictions, even while he participated in political activism and pursued an education, eventually earning a Ph.D. in social science.

The Black Panther Party was a Black American left-wing organization working for the right of self-defense for Black Americans in the United States.

The Party achieved national and international impact and renown through their deep involvement in the Black Power movement and in politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The group's "provocative rhetoric, militant posture, and cultural and political flourishes permanently altered the contours of American Identity"

Newton and the Panthers started a number of social programs in Oakland, including founding the Oakland Community School, which provided high-level education to 150 children from impoverished urban neighborhoods. Other Panther programs included the Free Breakfast for Children Program and others that offered dances for teenagers and training inmartial arts. According to Oakland County Supervisor John George: "Huey could take street-gang types and give them a social consciousness".

On August 22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot on the 1400 block of 9th street in West Oakland by 24-year-old BGF member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson. Newton's last words, as he stood facing his killer, were, "You can kill my body, but you can't kill my soul. My soul will live forever!" He was then shot two times in the face by Robinson. He was interred at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland.

"I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people." --Huey Newton

BLACK WALLSTREET"The Name Fittingly Given To One Of The Most Affluent All-BLACK Communities In America

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:05:00 +0000

The date was June 1, 1921 when "BLACK WALLSTREET", the name fittingly given to one of the most affluent all-BLACK communities in America , was bombed from the air and burned to the ground by mobs of envious whites. In a period spanning fewer than 12 hours, a once thriving Black business district in northern Tulsa lay smoldering--a model community destroyed and a major African-American economic movement resoundingly defused.

The night's carnage left some 3,000 African Americans dead and over 600 successful businesses lost. Among these were 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores and two movie theaters, plus a hospital, a bank, a post office, libraries, schools, law offices, a half dozen private airplanes and even a bus system. As could have been expected, the impetus behind it all was the infamous Ku Klux Klan, working in consort with ranking city officials and many other sympathizers.

The best description of BLACK WALLSTREET, or little Africa as it was also known, would be to compare it to a mini-Berverly Hills. It was the golden door of the BLACK community during the early 1900s, and it proved that African Americans could create a successful infrastructure. That's what BLACK WALLSTREET was all about.

The dollar circulated 36 to 100 times, sometimes taking a year for currency to leave the community. Now a dollar leaves the BLACK community in 15-minutes. As far as resources, there were Ph.D.'s residing in little Africa , BLACK attorneys and doctors. One doctor was Dr. Berry who owned the bus system. His average income was $500 a day, a hefty pocket change in 1910.

It was a time when the entire state of Oklahoma had only two Airports, yet six BLACKS owned their own planes. It was a very fascinating community. The mainstay of the community was to educate every child. Nepotism was the one word they believed in. and that's what we need to get back to.

The main thoroughfare was Greenwood Avenue , and it was intersected by Archer and Pine Streets. From the first letters in each of those three names you get G.A.P. and that's where the renowned R and B music group the GAP Band got its name. They're from Tulsa .

BLACK WALLSTREET was a prime example of the typical, BLACK community in America that did businesses, but it was in an unusual location. You see, at the time, Oklahoma was set aside to be a BLACK and Indian state. There were over 28 BLACK townships there. One third of the people who traveled in the terrifying "Trail of Tears" along side the Indians between 1830 and 1842 were BLACK people.

The citizens of this proposed Indian and BLACK state chose a BLACK governor, a treasurer from Kansas named McDade. But the Ku Klux Klan said that if he assumed office that they would kill him within 48 hours. A lot of BLACKS owned farmland, and many of them had gone into the oil business. The community was so tight and wealthy because they traded dollars hand-to-hand, and because they were dependent upon one another as a result of the Jim Crow Laws.

It was not unusual that if a resident's home accidentally burned down, it could be rebuilt within a few weeks by neighbors. This was the type of scenario that was going on day-to-day on BLACK WALLSTREET. When BLACKs intermarried into the Indian culture, some of them received their promised '40 acres and a mule' and with that came whatever oil was later found on the properties.

On BLACK WALLSTREET, a lot of global business was conducted, the community flourished from the early 1900s until June 1, 1921. That's when the largest massacre of nonmilitary Americans in the history of this country took place, and it was lead by the KU KLUX KLAN. Imagine walking out of your front door and seeing 1,500 homes being burned. It must have been amazing.

Survivors we interviewed think that the whole thing was planned because during the time that all of this was going on; white families with their children stood around the borders of their community and watched the massacre. The looting and everything--much in the same manner they would watch a lynching.

The riots weren't caused by anything black or white. It was caused by jealousy. A lot of white folks had come back from World War I and they were poor. When they looked over into the BLACK communities and realized that BLACK men who fought in the war had come, home heroes that helped trigger the destruction.

It cost the BLACK community everything, and not a single dime of restitution--no insurance claims-- has been awarded the victims to this day. Nonetheless, they rebuilt. We estimate 1,500 to 3,000 people were killed and we know that a lot of them were buried in mass graves all around the city. Some were thrown into the river. As a matter of fact, at 21st street and Yale Avenue , where there now stands a Sears parking lot, that corner used to be a coal mine. They threw a lot of the bodies into the shafts.

Unmarked graves

TULSA, Oklahoma (CNN) -- Beulah Smith and Kenny Booker, two elderly Oklahomans, lived through one of the worst race riots in U.S. history, a rarely mentioned 1921 Tulsa blood bath that officially took dozens of African-American lives, but more likely claimed hundreds, perhaps even thousands.

The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, formed two years ago to determine exactly what happened, will consider next week the controversial issue of what, if any, reparations should be paid to the known survivors of the riot, a group of less than 100 that includes Smith, now 92, and Booker, 86.

'The gun went off, the riot was on'

On the night of May 31, 1921, mobs called for the lynching of Dick Rowland, a black man who shined shoes, after hearing reports that on the previous day he had assaulted Sarah Page, a white woman, in the elevator she operated in a downtown building.

A local newspaper had printed a fabricated story that Rowland tried to rape Page. In an editorial, the same newspaper said a hanging was planned for that night.

As groups of both blacks and whites converged on the Tulsa courthouse, a white man in the crowd confronted an armed black man, a war veteran, who had joined with other blacks to protect Rowland.

A fabricated newspaper story triggered the violent riots that may have left hundreds, if not thousands, dead.

Commission member Eddie Faye Gates told CNN what happened next. "This white man," she said, asked the black man, "what are you doing with this gun?'"

"'I'm going to use it if I have to,'" the black man said, according to Gates, "and (the white man) said, 'No, you're not. Give it to me,' and he tried to take it. The gun went off, the white man was dead, the riot was on."

Truckloads of whites set fires and shot blacks on sight. When the smoke lifted the next day, more than 1,400 homes and businesses in Tulsa 's Greenwood district, a prosperous area known as the "black Wall Street," lay in ruins.

Today, only a single block of the original buildings remains standing in the area.

The official death toll was below 100, most of them black, but there was always doubt about the actual number. Experts now estimate that at least 300 people, and perhaps as many as 3,000, died.

'We're in a heck of a lot of trouble'

Beulah Smith was 14 years old the night of the riot. A neighbor named Frenchie came pounding on her family's door in a Tulsa neighborhood known as "Little Africa " that also went up in flames.

"'Get your families out of here because they're killing niggers uptown,'" she remembers Frenchie saying. "We hid in the weeds in the hog pen," Smith told CNN.

People in a mob that came to Kenny Booker's house asked, "'Nigger, do you have a gun?'" he told CNN.

Booker, then a teen-ager, hid with his family in their attic until the home was torched. "When we got downstairs, things were burning. My sister asked me, 'Kenny, is the world on fire?' I said, 'I don't know, but we're in a heck of a lot of trouble, baby.'"

Another riot survivor, Ruth Avery, who was 7 at the time, gives an account matched by others who told of bombs dropped from small airplanes passing overhead. The explosive devices may have been dynamite or Molotov cocktails -- gasoline-filled bottles set afire and thrown as grenades.

"They'd throw it down and when it'd hit, it would burst into flames," Avery said.

Only a single block remains of the 1,400 homes and businesses that made up the area known as the 'black Wall Street'

Unmarked graves

Many of the survivors "mentioned bodies were stacked like cord wood," says Richard Warner of the Tulsa Historical Society.

In its search for the facts, the commission has literally been trying to dig up the truth.

Two headstones at Tulsa 's Oaklawn Cemetery indicate that riot victims are buried there. In an effort to determine how many, archeological experts in May used ground-piercing radar and other equipment to test the soil in a search for unmarked graves.

The test picked up indications that dozens, if not hundreds, of people may have been buried in an area just outside the cemetery.

http://www.robdedob.com/blackwallst.htm

If any of you have photographs, video clips, information or stories and would like them to appear on this website please contact us. If you appear in any of the photos or videos on this site and object to their display please contact .conelle008@gmail.com

BLACK WALLSTREET"The Name Fittingly Given To One Of The Most Affluent All-BLACK Communities In America

UNDERSTANDING THE USE OF THE TERM NEGROPEAN OR AFROPEAN

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 18:15:00 +0000

AFRIKAN BLOOD FRANTZ FANON :

was an author from Martinique, essayist, psychiatrist, and revolutionary. He was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades

What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”

“For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.”

UNDERSTANDING THE USE OF THE TERM NEGROPEAN OR AFROPEAN

However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

Frantz Fanon

SOME OF YOU HAVE NO IDEA ....

Collective guilt is borne by what is conventionally called the scapegoat. Now the scapegoat for white society--which is based on m ... yths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement--will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths. This brutal opposing force is supplied by the Negro.

I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of m ... y ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand the Congo.

“I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.”

FRANTZ FANON .

WRITE UP ABOUT FRANTZ FANON (JULY 20 1925 - 6 DECEMBER 1961

by Jocelyn Coldrey

Alice Cherki, a trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked under Fanon at both Bilda and in Tunis, was also an active comrade in the Algerian wage for independence, gives personal insight into fragments of Fanons life as well as the contemporary relevance his work and way of thinking (Cherki, 2006 and Martin, 2004: 165). The book gives a representation of Fanon as a person, exposing his temperament in a textual portrait. Cherki does not write a meticulous biography of Fanon’s life but rather draws to light certain experiences and ways of the world which enable the Fanonian reader to historically contextualize not only what he was exposed to at the time of his writing but also his mode of being in reality. She claims that it is “important to reconstruct the journey if one is to rein in the profusion of attributes that have been imputed to Fanon” (2006: 1). In harnessing her personal interaction with Fanon, and what she found out from other people, she places particular importance on the parallels between the way Fanon viewed psychiatric patients and colonized subjects. Ultimately her portrayal of Fanon’s life remains true to his belief that “[o]ne must not relate one’s past but, but stand as a testimony to it” (2006: 1).

Fanon the Human Being:

In the preface Cherki writes that Fanon’s, persona has become “synonymous with decolonization and the Third Worldism” (2006: ix). My initial encounters with Fanon which have been very minimal, in comparison to the colossal amount of Fanonian literature available, have lead me to idealising him as an omnipotent literary hero who shared deep prophetical insight into the process of decolonization and the inequalities of the world. Needless to say, when embarking on this week’s reading I was curious to find out about Fanon the human being whom embodied the persona which lives on through interpretations of his writing. Cherki’s clear admiration for Fanon, made this a harder task than anticipated, as time after time it becomes increasingly evident that Fanon may have been human but an exceptional one who visibly had a “profound talent for life” and manage to do remarkable amounts on very little sleep (2006: 3 and 92). In a similar manner to my idealization of Fanon, Claudine Claudette compares Fanon to a classical hero, similar to Jesus or Aristotle. Nevertheless, Cherki is quick to disagree and asserts that he was “much too human , put too much effort into trying to identify with others, and most of all he could not bear being alone” (2006” 161).

Cherki makes it clear, more than once, that Fanon was not an open person, and seemed to only share what he found important. This could be the result of the fact that he had to grapple with the injunction of a public life, which could result in a casual conversation about his experiences having bigger political consequences than what they deserved (2006: 101). On the other hand, and perhaps more plausibly, Cherki claims that Fanon’s reluctance to talk about the past could be a result of the fact that he “lived in the immediacy of the moment, with an intensity that embodied everything he invoked” (2006: 1).

The manner in which Cherki affectionately talks about Fanon expressively personifies Fanon By saying things like, “I can only smile when I think how those two would have gotten on each other’s nerves” (2006: 149), or the fact that she never noticed that he was black because she was so absorbed “on the sparkle in his eyes, of a brown so clear as to seem transparent, on the expressiveness of his elegantly dressed person” (2006: 3).

Fanon’s exceptional faith in human kind made him more of an idealist than a realist, but the fact that he wrote about his own reality could suggest that notions of him being an idealist are in actuality his optimistic attitude towards a “prospect that is human” (Fanon, 1963: 205).

Fanon, intrinsic faith in humankind resulted in him having very high expectations of people, and was disappointed when they did not achieve what he expected them to. Cherki claims that Fanon “[i]dealized and demanding expectations for what a human should be”, which must have stemmed from the universal importance he placed on human dignity (2006: 117). It could be said that Fanon’s excellence was often received with dismissal because of his skin colour ignited in his desire to see the human excellence in everyone, especially those who were dismissed. He believed that the process to decolonisation would only be successful if it included ordinary people. Which could be why he held his patients and those who worked under him accountable to what they were capable of. Cherki claimed that he was “demanding and relenting with those students who were less gifted or lazy” (2006: 80). In a similar manner Fanon’s attitude towards his patients Fanon “could be very demanding, often impatient and at times, even intrusive in his interactions with the mentally ill. He did, after all, prize their dignity as men and women above all else wanted to hold them to it” (2006: 23).

The emphasis in which Fanon places on action in his writing, makes it very plausible that the manner in which he practiced psychiatry would embody his political agendas. In a letter in which he wrote home to his parents whilst fighting he stated that “whenever human dignity and freedom are at stake… I will fight it to the end” (2006: 10). Furthermore, he was a diligent believer in the fact that every aspect of life is politicised and every single being carries their politics in their bodies (2006: 135).

Psychological unconscious trauma of being oppressed:

Fanon was obsessed with the connection between human beings

and the bonds which could quash all difference (2006: 61).

The parallels between the way Fanon approached his psychiatric patients resonated “as a spring board for colonial theories” (2006:1). This was presumably always evident in Fanon’s way of being, but in Bilda-Joinville, known as HPB, it becomes very apparent that the way the which the chronically insane where institutionalized echoed the core of Algiers exclusionary. Fanon, claims he was shocked in the manner in which different racial groups did not integrate and it was not because judicial legislature but rather the practiced norm imbedded deep into the unconscious reality of the people (2006: 54). The severity of Algerian racism was intrinsically encrypted into the bodies of the people (2006: 54). Yet that shock seemed minimal compared to the manner in which the mentally ill where dehumanized and almost treated like prisoners in the manner they were restrained and secluded (2006: 62). Fanon’s ability to empathise and respond to any form of human suffering and the continuous paradoxes which he found in humanization seemingly aided him in understanding the complexities of a human being (2006: 23).

Fanon transformed HBP into a space where the mentally ill could recover through the process of negotiating and language (2006: 73). He transformed the building into a space which did not incorporate one dominate ideology or religion, making it possible for people from all walks of life to feel a sense of belonging. Though he believed that difference could be quashed, he did discover that treating patients according their cultural particularity was essential (2006: 69). Similarly he asserted the necessity for cultural revival if oppression where ever to be entirely eradicated (2006: 88 and 144).

The similarities between Fanon’s attitude to the mentally ill and his political work are endless. He saw oppressed people as oppressed people and paved their way to recognition and human dignity in a similar way. Consequently Fanon’s text will live on in all instances of social exclusion and inclusion.

The longevity of Fanon’s Text:

A work belongs to its readers, and each new generation of readers is free to interpret Fanon’s work as it sees fit (Cherki, 2006: x).

Critics on literature have long argued the longevity of literary work, in the manner in which text can become fully “intelligible in terms of its cultural politics, social location and politics” of that time (Clark, 396). This understanding enables a specific situation represented in the text to be universally recognised. Cheriki, on more than one instance, asserts that no one who reads Fanon remains indifferent (Cherki, 2006: 48). The manner in which Fanon “worked language and allowed it to work him”, succeeds in the provoking the reader in to some sort of emotion, no matter the circumstance. Fundamental to Fanons life and writing exist in in the fact that humans adapt to fit a social situation, the essentialising of humans and culture is repudiated because they will always transform in according to the particular epoch surrounding them.

Through his diligent militancy to an actional way of life, Fanon develops a language which “arises out of a body in motion” (2006: 184). This seems to echo the bodily experience in which Fanon appropriates in his writing, the ‘lived experience of oppression’. Yet the process of writing distances itself away from the body and “[p]erhaps the only way we to overcome a traumatic severance of the body and mind is to come back to mind through body” (Hartman, 1995: 541).

Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth with his comrades in mind, he seemed to guess that what he had to say would enable the political struggles of the colonized to successfully decolonize (Cherki, 2006: 94). However, his insistence on Sartre writing the forward to his last book, suggests that if he was not around to defend his ideas, at least someone, who he agreed with, would be able to supervise the manner in which his book was to be received (Hartman, 1995: 548). In some ways this suggests Fanon’s awareness of the limitations of language. The incorporation of Sartre as a living being into his texts suggests an attempt to avoid the distortion which exists between the reader, text and author. Hartman (2006: 548) understands this distortion to be an “epistemological bias- which not only favours a progressive view of our knowledge, but sees the complex structure of our coming-to know as the clearing away of subjectivity”.

The human experience in which Fanon writes about continues to speak to the contemporary world despite ever changing epistemologies. This is likely because of Fanon’s understanding that the human subject and experience “cannot be methodized or reduced to an affirmative structure” (Hartman, 1995: 547). Though it is textually represented, it will continue to speak to the reader, with the aim of changing the reader or provoking the reader into action. Cherki asserts that as long as Fanon’s texts prompts the reader to “reflect and proceed, to act and think” anyone can relate without understanding the substance of his work (Cherki, 2006: 203)

Fanon repeatedly uses metaphors which beautifully embody his views enabling him to describe reality in manner whereby the images provoked remain judgement free and text speaks for itself (Cheriki, 2006: 77). Through the use of his metaphors he is able to “exhibit languages power to represent such intangible [motions such as decolonization]… through concrete images” (Attridge, 2004: 33). This is clear through the quote from The Wretched of the Earth which Cheriki (2006: 176) quotes at length:

If the building of the bridge does not enrich the awareness of the those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built and citizens can on swimming across the river or going by boat. The boat should not be “parachuted down from above; it should not be imposed by a deus machine upon the social scene; on the contrary it should come from the muscles and brains of the citizens (TWOE, 160).

Fanon uses a metaphorical bridge and its construction in order to deploy the manner in which all people should be involved in the process of decolonization. Though there is no doubt that Fanon wished to promote action from his text I do not think they serve as a moral guidance, but rather depicts language’s power to evoke guilt, to crystallize ethical gaols, to convey the difficulty of choice” (Attridge, 2004: 22).

In his autobiographical paper “Africains Antillais”, Fanon grapples with the paradox of his existence, in the multiplicity of his identity by stating “I am and I am not there” (Cheriki, 2006: 77). To contextually interpret his statement to the permanence of his work, Fanon is here and not here every time we read and respond to his texts and way of thought.

Tell me again why we should forget

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 17:30:00 +0000

“Tell Me Again”

Tell me again why we should forget

I see that you haven’t forgotten Pearl Harbor yet

Tell me again why you say you can’t

You paid everyone else for their time in the camps

Tell me again why we should ignore

The many times you said “you’re mama’s a whore”

Tell me again why because we fail to see

The reasons you hung all our men from a tree

Tell me again why our history you choked

For chaining us, killing us, suppressing our vote

Tell me again why we should share your terror

Our enemy’s long been who you see in the mirror

Tell me again why you wouldn’t relent

From calling our ancestors niggers and wench

Tell me again why so we’ll understand

And please with a straight face if you think you can

Tell me again why those little girls died

For once tell the truth not another ‘white lie’

Tell me again why now that you live in fear

It’s about time you felt what we felt all those years

Tell me again why because we’re not insane

We know no one’s cornered the market on pain

Tell me again why is it you find?

When you cry your tears they are wet just like mine

Tell me again why, we pray that you tell

Why when we made your heaven you gave us pure hell

Tell me again why what is your excuse

Why you won’t compensate us for all your abuse

Tell me again why because our ancestors need

To hear that you’re sorry for your hate and greed

Tell me again why, why should we forgive

The ones who detest the mere fact that we live

I’ll tell you why if I may be so bold

We have to forgive you to save our own souls.

From the gospel musical “Reaching For Freedom” by Jay Arrington

They murder and our peoples to enjoy our wealth. There is not a single day that goes by that we are not announcing cases of serious illnesses and deaths in various refugee camps in Africa.

This child forced to spend hours standing has taken an infusion bag is a victim of wars and political crises cause by white supremacy policy on Africa. This person lying in the trash fighting against death is also a victim of those who thing,they think the only way that leads to thepresidential palace is that of arms rebels sponsor by colonia masters.

THE FOLLY/MOCKERY OF A FOOLISH BRUT (BRITIAN)

Under King Leopold II, the state of Belgium murdered 10 million Africans in Congo, academics have yet to call this a genocide. As retaliation against communities that had not met their quota of rubber plantation, the Belgians KING LEOPOLDII cut off the hands of adults and children.

• Following an outcry at the barbarity of the situation, the Belgium Parliament Stop KING LEOPOLD OF BELGIUM from CONGO.

The European colonization of Africa was one of the greatest and swiftest conquests in human history. In 1870 roughly 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara Desert was governed by indigenous kings, chiefs, and other rulers. By 1910 nearly this entire huge expanse had become European colonies or land, like South Africa, controlled by white settlers. The bloodiest single episode in Africa's colonization took place in the center of the continent in the large territory, known as the Congo.

For centuries African slave dealers had raided parts of this area, selling their captives to American and European captains who sailed Africa's west coast, and to traders who took slaves to the Arab world from the continent's east coast. But heat, tropical diseases, and the huge rapids near the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic had long kept the Congo's interior a mystery to Europeans. From 1874 through 1877 the British explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841904) crossed Africa from east to west. For much of the journey he floated down the river, mapping its course for the first time and noting the many tributaries that, it turned out, comprised a network of navigable waterways more than 7,000 miles long.

Although Stanley is best known as the man who found Livingstone, his trip across the Congo basin was the greater feat of exploration and had far more impact on history. As he headed back to England, Stanley was assiduously courted by King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold (1835909) had ascended to the throne in 1865. A man of great charm, intelligence, ruthlessness, and greed, he was openly frustrated with inheriting the throne of such a small country, and in doing so at a time in history when European kings were rapidly losing power to elected parliaments. He had long wanted a colonial empire, and in Stanley he saw someone who could secure it for him. The Belgian cabinet of the day was not interested in colonies. But for Leopold this posed no problem; he would acquire his own.

In 1879 Stanley returned to the Congo as Leopold's agent. He built outposts and a road around the river's rapids and, using small steamboats, he traveled up and down the great river and its tributaries. Combining gift-giving with a show of military force, he persuaded hundreds of illiterate African chiefs, most of whom had little idea of the terms of the agreement to which they were ostensibly acceding, to sign away their land to the king.

Stanley made his way back to Europe with a sheaf of signed treaties in 1884. Meanwhile, Leopold had already begun the job of persuading first the United States and then all the major nations of Europe to recognize his claim. A master of public relations who portrayed himself as a great philanthropist, the king orchestrated successful lobbying campaigns in one country after another. He made further progress toward realizing his objective at a diplomatic conference in Berlin in 1884 and 1885 that the major European powers attended. In 1885 he proclaimed the existence of the misnamed at Indépendant du Congo, or, as it was known in English, the Congo Free State, with himself the King-Sovereign. In later years he sometimes referred to himself as the Congo's proprietor. It was the world's only major colony owned by one man.

Equipped with repeating rifles, cannons, and machine guns and fighting against Africans with only spears or antiquated muskets, King Leopold's 19,000-man army (black conscripts under white officers) gradually took control of the vast territory. From the start the regime was founded on forced labor. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were put to work as porters to carry the white men's goods, as cutters of the wood needed to fire steamboat boilers, and as laborers of all kinds. In the early years the main commodity Leopold sought was ivory. Joseph Conrad, who spent six months in the Congo in 1890, draws a memorable portrait of this rapacious trade in his novel Heart of Darkness.

THE RUBBER BOOM

In the early 1890s, however, a larger source of wealth suddenly loomed. The invention of the inflatable bicycle tire, followed soon by that of the automobile tire, triggered an enormous boom in rubber. Throughout the world's tropics people rushed to establish rubber plantations. But new rubber trees often require fifteen years of growth before they can be tapped. During that window of time those who profited were the people who owned land where rubber grew wild. No one owned more land like this than King Leopold II, for equatorial rain forest, dotted with wild rubber vines, comprised half of his Congo state.

THE KING'S ENEMIES

King Leopold II's rule over the Congo met fierce resistance. In the far south, for example, a chief named Mulume Niama led warriors of the Sanga people in a rebellion that killed one of the king's officers. State troops pursued them, trapping Mulume Niama and his soldiers in a large cave. They refused to surrender, and when troops finally entered the cave three months later, they found 178 bodies. Nzansu, a chief in the region near the great Congo River rapids, led rebels who killed a hated colonial official and pillaged several state posts, although they carefully spared the homes of nearby Swedish missionaries.

Nzansu's men fought on sporadically for five years more, and no record of his fate exists.

In addition, Leopold's regime faced resistance from within his own conscript army, whose soldiers sometimes found a common cause with the rebel groups they were supposed to pursue. The largest mutiny involved three thousand troops and an equal number of auxiliaries and porters, and continued for three years. "The rebels displayed a courage worthy of a better cause," (Flament et al., 1952, p. 417) acknowledged the army's official historyhich, remarkably, devoted fully one-quarter of its pages to the various campaigns against mutineers within the army's own ranks.

The king also faced enemies of another sort. To curry diplomatic favor, he allowed several hundred Protestant missionaries into the Congo. Most made no protest, but some were outraged at the brutal forced labor system. In articles in church magazines and in speeches throughout the United States and Europe on visits home, they described what they saw: Africans whipped to death, rivers full of corpses, and piles of severed hands detail that quickly seared itself on the world's imagination. Army officers often demanded of their men a severed hand from each rebel killed in battle.

E. V. Sjöblom of Sweden was one of the first and most outspoken missionaries in the Congo. Alice Harris, a British Baptist, took photographs of the atrocities she witnessed. William Morrison, a white man, and William Sheppard, the first black missionary in the Congo, were Presbyterians from Virginia whose acts of witness so infuriated Congo colonial authorities that they put the men on trial for libel.

Leopold's most formidable enemy surfaced in Europe. A British shipping company had the monopoly on all cargo traffic between the Congo and Belgium, and every few weeks it sent to the port of Antwerp a young junior official, Edmund Dene Morel, to supervise the unloading of a ship arriving from Africa. Morel, in his mid-twenties at the time, noticed that when his company's ships arrived from the Congo, they were filled to the hatch with enormously valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. When the ships turned around and steamed back to Africa, however, they carried no merchandise in exchange. Nothing was being sent to the Congo to pay for the goods flowing to Europe. Instead, the ships carried soldiers, and large quantities of firearms and ammunition. Standing on the dock, Morel realized that he had uncovered irrefutable proof that a forced labor system was in operation 4,000 miles away.

Morel soon quit his job and in short order turned himself into the greatest British investigative journalist of his time. For a dozen years, from 1901 to 1913, working sometimes fourteen to sixteen hours a day, he devoted his formidable energy and skill to putting the story of forced labor in King Leopold's Congo on the world's front pages. In Britain he founded the Congo Reform Association, and affiliated groups sprang up in the United States and other countries. He wrote three books on the Congo, several dozen pamphlets, and hundreds of newspaper articles, making much use of eyewitness testimony from the missionaries. He traveled throughout Britain speaking to large audiences and was adept at recruiting bishops, well-known writers, and other luminaries to join him on the lecture platform. More than one thousand mass meetings to protest slave labor in the Congo were held, mostly in Britain and the United States, but also in Europe and as far away as Australia and New Zealand.

After Morel orchestrated a protest resolution by the British Parliament, the government, in response, asked its representative in the Congo to investigate his charges. The British consul, an Irishman named Roger Casement, later famous as an Irish patriot, took the assignment seriously. Renting a missionary steamboat, he spent more than three months traveling in the interior. He produced an excoriating, detailed report, complete with sworn testimony from witnesses, which is in many ways a model for the reports produced by contemporary organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch.

The king's colonial officials quickly set up a brutal but effective system for harvesting wild rubber. A detachment of soldiers would march into an African village and seize the women as hostages. To secure their wives' release, the men would have to disperse into the rain forest to collect the sap of wild rubber vines. As the vines near a village were often drained dry, the men would sometimes have to walk for days to find areas where they could gather their monthly quota of rubber. As rubber prices soared, so did the quotas. Discipline was harsh; reluctant military conscripts, disobedient porters, and villagers who failed to gather enough rubber all fell victim to the notorious chicotte, a whip made of sun-dried hippopotamus hide with razor-sharp edges. A hundred lashes of the chicotte, a not infrequent punishment, could be fatal. Army officers and colonial officials earned bonuses based on the amount of rubber collected in areas under their control. These were an incentive for ruthless, devastating plunder.

Many women hostages were raped and a significant number starved to death. Male rubber gatherers often died from exhaustion. And under such circumstances people tended to stop having children, so the birthrate plummeted as a result. With most able-bodied adults prisoners or forced laborers for several weeks out of each month, villages had few people who could plant and harvest food, or go hunting or fishing, and famine soon spread. Furthermore, huge, uncounted numbers of Congolese fled the forced labor regime, but the only refuge to which they could escape was the depths of the rain forest, where there was little food and no shelter; travelers would discover their bones years later. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Africans also died in two decades' worth of unsuccessful uprisings against the king's regime.

An even greater toll was taken by disease: various lung and intestinal diseases, tuberculosis, smallpox, and, above all, sleeping sickness. The great population movements caused by the colonial regime brought these illnesses into areas where people had not built up an immunity to them, and many would have died even under a government far less brutal than Leopold's. However, disease of any kind always takes a far greater toll on a traumatized, half-starving population, with many people already in flight as refugees.

In two ways the Congo's rubber boom had lasting impact beyond the territory itself. First, the system of exploitation established there became a model for colonial rule in other parts of central Africa. Many of the surrounding colonies also had rain forests rich in wild rubberortuguese-controlled northern Angola, the Cameroons under the Germans, and the French Congo, part of French Equatorial Africa, across the Congo River. Seeing what profits Leopold was reaping from forced labor, officials in these colonies soon adopted exactly the same systemncluding women hostages, forced male labor, and the chicotteith equally fatal consequences.

The events in King Leopold's Congo also rippled beyond its borders in a more positive way: They gave birth to the twentieth century's first great international human rights movement (see sidebar). The movement, in fact, eventually forced Leopold to relinquish his private ownership of the Congo to the Belgian state in 1908. By that point he had made a huge profit from the territory, conservatively estimated as the equivalent of more than $1.1 billion in early twenty-first century terms.

THE TOLL

In the newly christened Belgian Congo, however, the forced labor system did not immediately end. It was too lucrative, for the price of rubber was still high. Eventually, the price fell and wild rubber supplies began to run out, but by that time World War I had begun, and large numbers of Africans were forced to become porters, carrying supplies for Belgian military campaigns against Germany's African colonies. Forced labor remained a major part of the Congo's economy for many years after the war. Starting in the early 1920s, however, the system became considerably less draconian, mainly because colonial officials realized that otherwise they would soon have no labor force left.

"We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear," declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium in 1924, "so that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert" (Hoornaert and Louwers, 1924, p. 101).

Between the time that Leopold started to assume control of the Congo (around 1880) and when the forced labor system became less severe (after 1920), what happened could not, by strict definition, be called genocide, for there was no deliberate attempt to wipe out all members of one particular ethnic group. But the slashing of the territory's populationhrough a combination of disease, famine, slave labor, suppression of rebellions, and diminished birthratendisputably occurred on a genocidal scale.

In estimating situations without the benefit of complete census data, demographers are more confident speaking of percentages than absolute numbers. Using a wide variety of local and church sources, Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and the leading ethnographer of Congo basin peoples, calculates that the Congo's population dropped by some 50 percent during this period, an estimate with which other modern scholars concur. Interestingly, a longtime high colonial official, Major Charles C. Liebrechts, made the same estimate in 1920. Shocked by recent local census statistics that showed less than one child per woman, the official Commission Institueé pour la Protection des Indigènes made a similar reckoning in 1919.

Its report that year to the Belgian king mostly focused on disease, but stressed that forced labor for rubber and other products "subjects the natives to conditions of life which are an obstacle to their increase" and warned that this situation, plus "a lack of concern about devastating plagues ancient and modern, an absolute ignorance of people's normal lives [and] a license and immorality detrimental to the development of the race," had reached "the point of threatening even the existence of certain Congolese peoples" and could completely depopulate the entire region (Bulletin Officiel, 1920, pp. 657, 660, 662). Writing in the same year, R. P. Van Wing, a Belgian Jesuit missionary, estimated that the population of the Bakongo people, one of the territory's largest ethnic groups, had been reduced by two-thirds.

Obtaining more precise statistics is difficult, for in 1908 King Leopold ordered the archives of his Congo state burned. But numerous surviving records from the rubber-bearing land in the adjoining French Congo, which closely followed the model of the Leopoldian forced labor system, also suggest a population loss there of around 50 percent. If the estimates from varied sources of a 50 percent toll in King Leopold's Congo are correct, how many people does this mean? In 1924 the first territory-wide census, when adjusted for undercounting, placed the number of colony inhabitants at some ten million. If that figure is accurate and it represents 50 percent of what the population had been in 1880, this would suggest a loss of 10 million people.

“GEORGE WASHINGTON” WILLIAMS

Virtually no information about the true nature of King Leopold's Congo reached the outside world until the arrival there, in 1890, of an enterprising visitor named George Washington Williams. He was a veteran of the American Civil War, a historian, a Baptist minister, a lawyer, and the first black member of the Ohio state legislature. Wearing one of his many hats, that of a journalist, Williams expected to see the paradise of enlightened rule that Leopold had described to him in Brussels. Instead, he found what he called "the Siberia of the African Continent." Almost the only early visitor to interview Africans about their experience of the regime, he took extensive notes, and, a thousand miles up the Congo River, wrote one of the greatest documents in human rights literature, an open letter to King Leopold that is one of the important landmarks in human rights literature. Published in many American and European newspapers, it was the first comprehensive, detailed indictment of the regime and its slave labor system. Sadly, Williams, only forty-one years old, died of tuberculosis on his way home from Africa, but not before writing several additional denunciations of what he had seen in the Congo. In one of them, a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State, he used a phrase that was not commonly heard again until the Nuremberg trials more than fifty years later. Leopold II, Williams declared, was guilty of "crimes against humanity." ADAM HOCHSCHILD

Some writers, almost entirely in Belgium, claim that such estimates are exaggerated. But other scholars use even higher numbers. Although neither figure is well-documented, Hannah Arendt's seminal The Origins of Totalitarianism cites an estimated minimum population loss of 11.5 million, and a Congolese historian writing in 1998, Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, estimates the loss at roughly 13 million. Humankind will never know even the approximate toll with any certainty, but beyond any doubt what happened in the Congo was one of the great catastrophes of modern times.

• LINK1 - http://www.julianmonroefisher.com/katanga/pages/story.htm

• LINK2 - http://africasacountry.com/2012/04/11/black-africa-white-marble/

Signature of King Leopold II (1835-1909)

Approving the annexation of Congo to Belgium, 1908

• LINK3 - http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F7091FFA3E541B728DDDAF0994DC405B8985F0D3

• LINK4 - http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04228a.htm

CONGO INDEPENDENT STATE AND CONGO MISSIONS

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following account of the Congo Independent State was written before the annexation of the State by the Belgian Government. Belgium's right to take over the Congo and the successive steps which have led up to the annexation will be found treated under sections II and VII. On 20 August, 1908, the Chamber of Deputies approved the treaty of annexation, and on 9 September following the treaty was adopted by the Belgian Senate. By this agreement the Belgian Government took over the Independent State, including the Domaine de la Couronne, with all its rights and obligations. Among other trusts the government guaranteed certain allowances to Prince Albert and Princess Clementine, and created two funds, one, $9,100,000 to be expended in Belgium for public works, and another of $10,000,000 to be paid to the king and his successors in fifteen annuities and used for objects connected with the Congo. The present article deals with the Independent State — both in its interior organization and international position — as it was down to the time of the annexation.]

DO NOT RUN AWAY FROM THIS BUT ANSWER THESE FACTS!

Then it is righteous an “Act of God” with excuses to rule/control.

How about the fact before slavery 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 yrs ago or more (This is a factural!!!)

• No Slaves, therefore it is not cultural of a culture.

• Who taught you that lie hmm them "MAKE BELIEVERS (PRETENDERS)"

Any form of intelligent melanin (black) being will not adventure out to enslave others but rather lighten/prepare them for greatness (SEARCH FOR IMHOTEP).

• Did Our Ancestors enslave others with chains, yokes and force labor?

- JAH RAEL

FRANCE ,THE CHAMPION OF COUP D'ETAT IN AFRICA.

The Resolution ( tricky game of UN ) of the crisis in Central African Republic---The African Union is opposing to France.

The diplomacy of the country of Francois Holland is to "protect" the brutal rebels of Sekela in Central Africa,the same way France has done and continued to do in Cote d'Ivoire ( Ivory Coast)

France always use the "Black" rebels to remove African presidents in power.

The question everybody is asking is :until when U.N. will always allow such an imperialist and "former" colonial country like France has to always draw up resolutions over its "former colonies" ? Is that its "private propriety" ?

France is always the "godmother" of all the coup d'etat" in the "francophone" African countries. France uses numerous machinations to strip the power of African leaders by backing rebels and this is the case with the Central African Republic rebels who just overthrow a "president" who was himself came to power by coup d'Etat with the help of France and now he has been removed from power with the "help" of France.

It is not a secret for anyone that France is behind this coup d'Etat and now France is trying to legitimate the rebels,outlaw people to run the Central African Republic so they can freely let French corporations,businesspeople to get access to the diamonds,the uranium,timbers,etc.

African Union has protested against the 7 rebel "leaders" of Seleka which has their main leader residing in France. AU wants to sanction these 7 rebel leaders by banning them to go out of the country and wants to freeze their bank accounts. These rebels have been using children as soldiers ,they have committed rapes,killing of people and burning of villages and towns across the Central African Republic

Kimpa Vita (1684 to 1706) Saint of Kongo.The founder of the first black Christian movement in Africa..

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:10:00 +0000

Kimpa Vita (Dona Beatriz) (1684–1706) Saint of Kongo

One of the first African women to fight against European dominance in Africa during the colonial period & expose the racism and misogyny in the Catholic church.

The founder of the first black Christian movement in Sub-Saharan Africa.

She fought all forms of slavery, and tried to reconcile Christianity with African religions and beliefs, teaching people that black saints mingled with white saints in paradise. This was revolutionary, since Catholic priests in the area (Capuchins) taught that ONLY white saints could be found in heaven

While still in her teens, she started a non-violent anti Colonial movement to liberate the Kingdom of Kongo and return it to its former glory.

Led thousands of her people to rebuild and repopulate Mbanza Kongo, the capital of the once glorious unified Kingdom of Kongo.

She was burned at the stake as a which for heresy.

death was a time of internal strife, political unrest and civil war. As was the centuries old tradition with Kongolese nobles, she was baptised into the Roman Catholic church at birth.

She was shaped by two things:

African Spirituality & Christianity

As a child Kimpa Vita had ‘gifts’, she constantly saw visions and dreamt of playing with angels. Due to her innate spirituality, Kimpa Vita was trained as a (Shaman) Nganga marinda, a individual who consults the supernatural world to solve problems within the community. As could be expected, the European missionaries did not like the existence of the Nganga marinda nor did they like the fact that the Kongolese widely accepted them as legitimate (this despite two centuries of Catholicism).

Decline of the Kingdom of Kongo

The kingdom of Kongo (now a part of modern Angola and Congo), the wealthiest and most powerful state in the Atlantic region of Central Africa during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, began to dissolve in the seventeenth century under internal and external pressures. Portuguese military aggression emanating from the Angola colony to the south spurred the kingdom’s disintegration, notably at the in 1665 at which Portuguese troops killed the Kongo ruler Antonio I. The kingdom was plagued by devastating civil wars which fed the ravenous Atlantic slave trade. By the turn of the eighteenth century there was an immense political and cultural vacuum, the Kongo capital Mbanza Kongo (also known as São Salvador) had been abandoned and the kingdom had broken up into small territories ruled by warlords and members of the old Kongo nobility. Memories of Kongo’s past glory remained, however, and a series of popular movements developed out of the Kongo people’s desire to restore the kingdom to its former greatness.

Mission

With her training as a shaman and her identification as a Christian, Kimpa Vita began to be recognized as a prophetess. In 1704 at the age of 20 she had a near death experience when she appeared to die of a fever. When she had been resuscitated she believed that she now spoke with the voice of the patron saint of Kongo, and also incidentally the patron saint of Portugal, she believed Saint Anthony became incarnate in her body and so she became the physical manifestation of the saint, who addressed the kingdom’s problems through her.

Compelled by the Christian God to announce his word to restore the kingdom through adherence to a vision of Catholicism that was set firmly within Kongo history and geography. She also wanted to restore the former Kongo capital San Salvador.

She concerned herself with the restoration, spiritually and politically, of the Kongo Kingdom. Kimpa Vita’s religious ideology came as an answer to the prayers of many Kongolese people. In her message She combined traditional Kongolese beliefs with Catholicism. Creating her own her own Christian movement, known as She wanted a religious system that was set firmly within Kongo history and geography. From her visions she believed Kongo must reunite under a new king & was a way of doing this. Much to the dismay of the Catholic Church, Kimpa Vita quickly attracted a large following of common people, as well as some nobility who flocked to the city, which Kimpa identified as the biblical Bethlehem.

Rejecting missionary domination over Christianity, she preached that;

Kongo was the Holy Land described in the Bible 

The Kongolese capital, Mbanza Kongo (also known as Sao Salvador) was the real site of Bethlehem .

Jesus was born in Mbanza Kongo and baptized not at Nazareth but in the northern province of Nsundi.

Jesus Christ and the other saints were black Africans

Mary was a slave of a Kongo marquis.

Heaven was for also for Africans .

The European church was not beneficial to Kongolese.

Kimpa Vita claimed all this had been divulged to her by God. She died every Friday and went to spend the weekend in heaven where she met God personally and discussed such topics as Kongo politics. Indeed, Kimpa Vita’s ideology may seem radical but not if you look at the history of Catholicism and Christianity in the Kingdom of Kongo and examine how the people learnt to adapt a foreign religion with their local traditions. They felt that the Christian missionaries were corrupt and unsympathetic to the spiritual needs of Kongolese Catholics.

The History Catholicism in Congo

The Kingdom of Kongo had been Catholic for two centuries by the time Kimpa Vita was born. In 1491

you, the king of Kongo at that time, was the first royal to be baptised. However, Nzinga a Nukwu ended up changing his mind and leaving his newly adopted religion after some years, it was his son who surely established the church in Kongo and attempted to make the country a Catholic one. Afonso I went further by creating schools that taught European education and Christianity to the nobility. He also had members of the noble class sent to Portugal to further their education and worked with both educated Kongolese and Portuguese priests in his government.

This tradition continued with Afonso’s son, Henrique becoming the first bishop from sub-saharan Africa in 1518. Christianity grew further in the 16th century particularly under the reigns of Kings Alvaro I and Alvaro II who gave nobles titles such as Count, Duke and Marquis in the European manner. They also brought in relics such as bones of martyrs from Europe and established an embassy in Rome.

The Kongolese had formed their own brand of Christianity even before Kimpa Vita arrived. At a point in the kingdom’s history, the royalty wanted to create their own bishops and clergy which didn’t go well with the Pope and the Portuguese clergy. All attempts by foreign missionaries to purge local elements from the Kongolese Catholicism were met with resistance and ultimately failed (the same thing happened when the Dutch Calvinists tried to preach their faith).

The issue may have been that though the Kongolese believed they were worshiping an African God, they were not vocal about it. Missionaries taught the opposite of what Kimpa Vita (and most of the Kongolese population) believed, arguing that heaven was for whites only and that Jesus and all saints were white. Kimpa Vita vocally opposed such ideas and turned them upside down. She fought against the ‘Europeanization’ of Christianity and Kongo. .

However Kimpa Vita was not only trying to spread a purely African version of Christianity, at the same time she was also trying to bring an end to the civil wars that were weakening the Kingdom of Kongo. Kimpa Vita fought against slavery which was a thriving industry thanks to those numerous wars.

Death

Her involvement in politics that eventually led to her fall, when Pedro Constantinho da Silva, a general to the King Pedro IV & a rival to the throne, saw an ally with Kimpa Vita as a means to the throne. Kimpa was now seen as a enemy to King Pedro IV, because of her influence, her allies and her opposition against the Portuguese, Kimpa Vita was captured near her hometown, was tried under Kongo law as a witch and a heretic and burned at the stake for heresy in the temporary capital of Evululu on July 2, 1706 by forces loyal to Pedro IV under the watchful eyes of the European (Capuchin) missionaries.

In 1710, the perpetrators sent a report of their “mission” to the pope, after having organized the persecution of her followers.

The Anthonian prophetic movement outlasted her death. Her followers continued to believe that she was still alive, and it was only when Pedro IV’s forces took São Salvador in 1709 that the political force of her movement was broken, and most of her former noble adherents renounced their beliefs and rejoined the church.

Conclusion

Kongo’s history is even more fascinating because while the people were staunch Catholics, they disliked the invading Portuguese who had brought the religion to them.

The importance of Kimpa Vita is that she was one of the earliest recorded African women who fought against European Imperialism in the colonial era. Her knowledge and understanding of Kongolese Spirituality, history, culture and Christianity allowed her to see her how European religion was being used manipulate Kongo.

She used this knowledge to try to reconcile Christianity with African belief systems to unite & restore the Kingdom of Kongo.

Legacy

The Antonian movement, which Kimpa began, outlasted her. The Kongo king Pedro IV used it to unify and renew his kingdom. Her ideas remained among the peasants, appearing in various messianic cults until, two centuries later, it took new form in the preaching of Simon KIMBANGU.

It is thought that In 1739, some of her followers, sold as slaves in America, carried out the revolt well known as the “Stono rebellion” in South Carolina, and her teachings also may have inspired the action of former Kongo slaves, during the revolt which led to the independence of Haiti in 1804.

To those who know of her today Kimpa Vita is regarded as a prophetess and a symbol of non-violent resistance in Africa, inspiring many political and religious leaders in Congo and Angola.

The Importance & Interest Of Her Rehabilitation

The French people rehabilitated Jeanne d’ Arc (Joan of Arc) five centuries after her death. She then became “Sainte Jeanne d’ Arc”(Saint-Joan of Arc), in spite of the controversy around her life. Dona Beatrice Kimpa Vita was a victim of the religious intolerance and racism raging in her country and continent. Despite her accomplishments, Pope Paul VI rejected a request for her rehabilitation in 1966.

Even under these trying circumstances, a great woman emerged. Kimpa Vita also called Dona Beatriz continued the resistance against the Portuguese slave traders. She was a Kongolese aristocrat born in 1682. By 1704 she began to get national recognition as a prophetess. Though a Christian, she led an interpretation of Christian doctrine that her opponents called the Antonian Heresy. This theology created a national religion in Kongo that owed little to the Church of Rome. Vita preached that (1) Kongo was the Holy Land described in the Bible; (2) The Kongolese capital, Mbanza Kongo, is the real site of Bethlehem; (3) Christ and all the other saints were Black; (4) Heaven was for Africans only; and (5) The White church was the anti-Christ. Thus, she called on Africans not to listen to White missionaries. Her political programme was to find the new king of Kongo who would lead the next golden age of Kongo civilisation. Unfortunately, it was not to be. She was eventually captured and executed by the Portuguese in 1706.

BRICS Leaders For Bank And Beyond

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:45:00 +0000

(Durban, South Africa) – The five leaders of the BRICS countries jointly endorsed the founding of a BRICS bank Wednesday, and proposed a contingency fund of $100 billion that would ensure a financial safety net for the member countries.

“Following the report from our finance ministers, we are satisfied that the establishment of a New Development Bank is feasible and viable. We have agreed to establish the New Development Bank,” said a joint statement of the five BRICS heads of state at the conclusion of the BRICS Summit in Durban.

The construction of a financial safety net through the creation of a Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) among BRICS countries was also announced in the joint communiqué.

“In June 2012, in our meeting in Los Cabos, we tasked our finance ministers and Central Bank governors to explore the construction of a financial safety net through the creation of a Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) amongst BRICS countries.

“They have concluded that the establishment of a self-managed contingent reserve arrangement would have a positive precautionary effect, help BRICS countries forestall short-term liquidity pressures, provide mutual support and further strengthen financial stability,” says the statement.

The leaders also agreed that the establishment of the CRA with an initial size of $100 billion is “feasible and desirable”.

BRICS cooperation towards more productive use of global financial resources can make a positive contribution to addressing the problem of insufficient investment for infrastructure development, observed the statement.

China’s finance minister Lou Jiwei told the State-run Xinhua news agency that the establishment of the bank “is necessary”, adding that “the nations have great demand for fund to boost infrastructure construction”.

The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agrees.

“BRICS Bank initiative has opened doors to new possibilities of cooperation.”

The Empires Ideology: Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism of the Fools?

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:10:00 +0000

The Empire’s Ideology: Imperialism and “Anti-Imperialism of the Fools”

One of the great paradoxes of history are the claims of imperialist politicians to be engaged in a great humanitarian crusade, a historic “civilizing mission” designed to liberate nations and peoples, while practicing the most barbaric conquests, destructive wars and large scale bloodletting of conquered people in historical memory.

In the modern capitalist era, the ideologies of imperialist rulers vary over time, from the early appeals to “the right” to wealth, power, colonies and grandeur to later claims of a ‘civilizing mission’. More recently imperial rulers have propagated, many diverse justifications adapted to specific contexts, adversaries, circumstances and audiences.

This essay will concentrate on analyzing contemporary US imperial ideological arguments for legitimizing wars and sanctions to sustain dominance.

Contextualizing Imperial Ideology

Imperialist propaganda varies according to whether it is directed against a competitor for global power, or whether as a justification for applying sanctions, or engaging in open warfare against a local or regional socio-political adversary.

With regard to established imperial (Europe) or rising world economic competitors ( China ), US imperial propaganda varies over time. Early in the 19th century , Washington proclaimed the “Monroe Doctrine”, denouncing European efforts to colonize Latin America , privileging its own imperial designs in that region. In the 20th century when the US imperial policymakers were displacing Europe from prime resource based colonies in the Middle East and Africa , it played on several themes. It condemned ‘colonial forms of domination’ and promoted ‘neo-colonial’ transitions that ended European monopolies and facilitated US multi-national corporate penetration. This was clearly evident during and after World War 2, in the Middle East petrol-countries.

During the 1950s as the US assumed imperial primacy and radical anti-colonial nationalism came to the fore, Washington forged alliances with the declining colonial power to combat a common enemy and to prop up post-colonial powers to combat a common enemy . Even with the post World War 2 economic recovery, growth and unification of Europe, it still works in tandem and under US leadership in militarily repressing nationalist insurgencies and regimes. When conflicts and competition occur, between US and European regimes, banks and enterprises, the mass media of each region publish “investigatory findings” highlighting the frauds and malfeasance of its competitors ..and US regulatory agencies levy heavy fines on their European counterparts, overlooking similar practices by Wall Street financial firms.

In recent times the rising tide of militarist imperialism and colonial wars fueled by Israeli proxies in the US state has led to some serious divergencies between US and European imperialism. With the exception of England , Europe made a minimum symbolic commitment to the US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan . Germany and France concentrated on expanding their export markets and economic capacities; displacing the US in major markets and resource sites. The convergence of US and European empires led to the integration of financial institutions and the subsequent common crises and collapse but without any coordinated policy of recovery. US ideologists propagated the idea of a “declining and decaying European Union”, while the European ideologues emphasized the failures of Anglo-American de-regulated, ‘free markets’ and Wall Street swindles.

Imperial Ideology, Rising Economic Powers and Nationalist Challengers

There is a long history of imperialist “anti-imperialism”, officially sponsored condemnation, exposés and moral indignation directed exclusively against rival imperialists, emerging powers or simply competitors, who in some cases are simply following in the footsteps of the established imperial powers.

English imperialists in their heyday justified their world-wide plunder of three continents by perpetuating the “Black Legend”, of Spanish empire’s “exceptional cruelty” toward indigenous people of Latin America , while engaging in the biggest and most lucrative African slave trade. While the Spanish colonists enslaved the indigenous people, the Anglo-American settlers exterminated them…..

In the run-up to World War II, European and US imperial powers, while exploiting their Asian colonies condemned Japanese imperial powers’ invasion and colonization of China . Japan, in turn claimed it was leading Asia ’s forces fighting against Western imperialism and projected a post-colonial “co-prosperity” sphere of equal Asian partners.

The imperialist use of “anti-imperialist” moral rhetoric was designed to weaken rivals and was directed to several audiences. In fact, at no point did the anti-imperialist rhetoric serve to “liberate” any of the colonized people. In almost all cases the victorious imperial power only substituted one form colonial or neo-colonial rule for another.

The “anti-imperialism” of the imperialists is directed at the nationalist movements of the colonized countries and at their domestic public. British imperialists fomented uprisings among the agro-mining elites in Latin America promising “free trade” against Spanish mercantilist rule; they backed the “self-determination” of the slaveholding cotton plantation owners in the US South against the Union; they supported the territorial claims of the Iroquois tribal leaders against the US anti-colonial revolutionaries … exploiting legitimate grievances for imperial ends. During World War II, the Japanese imperialists supported a sector of the nationalist anti-colonial movement in India against the British Empire . The US condemned Spanish colonial rule in Cuba and the Philippines and went to war to “liberate” the oppressed peoples from tyranny….and remained to impose a reign of terror, exploitation and colonial rule…

The imperial powers sought to divide the anti-colonial movements and create future “client rulers” when and if they succeeded. The use of anti-imperialist rhetoric was designed to attract two sets of groups. A conservative group with common political and economic interests with the imperial power, which shared their hostility to revolutionary nationalists and which sought to accrue greater advantage by tying their fortunes to a rising imperial power. A radical sector of the movement tactically allied itself with the rising imperial power, with the idea of using the imperial power to secure resources (arms, propaganda, vehicles and financial aid) and, once securing power, to discard them. More often than not, in this game of mutual manipulation between empire and nationalists, the former won out … as is the case then and now.

The imperialist “anti-imperialist” rhetoric was equally directed at the domestic public, especially in countries like the US which prized its 18th anti-colonial heritage. The purpose was to broaden the base of empire building beyond the hard line empire loyalists, militarists and corporate beneficiaries. Their appeal sought to include liberals, humanitarians, progressive intellectuals, religious and secular moralists and other “opinion-makers” who had a certain cachet with the larger public, the ones who would have to pay with their lives and tax money for the inter-imperial and colonial wars.

The official spokespeople of empire publicize real and fabricated atrocities of their imperial rivals, and highlight the plight of the colonized victims. The corporate elite and the hardline militarists demand military action to protect property, or to seize strategic resources; the humanitarians and progressives denounce the “crimes against humanity” and echo the calls “to do something concrete” to save the victims from genocide. Sectors of the Left join the chorus and, finding a sector of victims who fit in with their abstract ideology, plead for the imperial powers to “arm the people to liberate themselves” (sic). By lending moral support and a veneer of respectability to the imperial war, by swallowing the propaganda of “war to save victims” the progressives become the prototype of the “anti-imperialism of the fools”. Having secured broad public support on the bases of “anti-imperialism”, the imperialist powers feel free to sacrifice citizens’ lives and the public treasury, to pursue war, fueled by the moral fervor of a righteous cause. As the butchery drags on and the casualties mount, and the public wearies of war and its cost, progressive and leftist enthusiasm turns to silence or worse, moral hypocrisy with claims that “the nature of the war changed” or “that this isn’t the kind of war that we had in mind …”. As if the war makers ever intended to consult the progressives and left on how and why they should engage in imperial wars!

In the contemporary period the imperial “anti-imperialist wars” and aggression have been greatly aided and abetted by well-funded “grass roots” so-called “non-governmental organizations” which act to mobilize popular movements which can “invite” imperial aggression.

Over the past four decades US imperialism has fomented at least two dozen “grass roots” movements which have destroyed democratic governments, or decimated collectivist welfare states or provoked major damage to the economy of targeted countries.

In Chile throughout 1972-73 under the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the CIA financed and provided major support – via the AFL-CIO–to private truck owners to paralyze the flow of goods and services .They also funded a strike by a sector of the copper workers union (at the El Tenient mine) to undermine copper production and exports, in the lead up to the coup. After the military took power several “grass roots” Christian Democratic union officials participated in the purge of elected leftist union activists. Needless to say in short order the truck owners and copper workers ended the strike, dropped their demands and subsequently lost all bargaining rights!

In the 1980’s the CIA via Vatican channels transferred millions of dollars to sustain the “Solidarity Union” in Poland, making a hero of the Gdansk shipyards worker-leader Lech Walesa, who spearheaded the general strike to topple the Communist regime. With the overthrow of Communism so also went guaranteed employment, social security and trade union militancy: the neo-liberal regimes reduced the workforce at Gdansk by fifty percent and eventually closed it, giving the boot to the entire workforce.. Walesa retired with a magnificent Presidential pension, while his former workmates walked the streets and the new “independent” Polish rulers provided NATO with military bases and mercenaries for imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq .

In 2002 the White House, the CIA, the AFL-CIO and NGOs, backed a Venezuelan military-business – trade union bureaucrat led “grass roots” coup that overthrew democratically elected President Chavez. In 48 hours a million strong authentic grass roots mobilization of the urban poor backed by constitutionalist military forces defeated the US backed dictators and restored Chavez to power .Subsequently oil executives directed a lockout backed by several US financed NGOs. They were defeated by the workers’ takeover of the oil industry. The unsuccessful coup and lockout cost the Venezuelan economy billions of dollars in lost income and caused a double digit decline in GNP.

The US backed “grass roots” armed jihadists to liberated “Bosnia” and armed the “grass roots” terrorist Kosova Liberation Army to break-up Yugoslavia. Almost the entire Western Left cheered as, the US bombed Belgrade , degraded the economy and claimed it was “responding to genocide”. Kosova “free and independent” became a huge market for white slavers, housed the biggest US military base in Europe, with the highest per-capita out migration of any country in Europe .

The imperial “grass roots” strategy combines humanitarian, democratic and anti-imperialist rhetoric and paid and trained local NGO’s, with mass media blitzes to mobilize Western public opinion and especially “prestigious leftist moral critics” behind their power grabs.

The Consequence of Imperial Promoted “Anti-Imperialist” Movements: Who Wins and Who Loses?

The historic record of imperialist promoted “anti-imperialist” and “pro-democracy” “grass roots movements” is uniformly negative. Let us briefly summarize the results. In Chile ‘grass roots’ truck owners strike led to the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and nearly two decades of torture, murder, jailing and forced exile of hundreds of thousands, the imposition of brutal “free market policies” and subordination to US imperial policies. In summary the US multi-national copper corporations and the Chilean oligarchy were the big winners and the mass of the working class and urban and rural poor the biggest losers. The US backed “grass roots uprisings” in Eastern Europe against Soviet domination, exchanged Russian for US domination; subordination to NATO instead of the Warsaw Pact; the massive transfer of national public enterprises, banks and media to Western multi-nationals. Privatization of national enterprises led to unprecedented levels of double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing rents and the growth of pensioner poverty.The crises induced the flight of millions of the most educated and skilled workers and the elimination of free public health, higher education and worker vacation resorts.

Throughout the now capitalist Eastern Europe and USSR highly organized criminal gangs developed large scale prostitution and drug rings; foreign and local gangster ‘entrepeneurs’ seized lucrative public enterprises and formed a new class of super-rich oligarchs Electoral party politicians, local business people and professionals linked to Western ‘partners’ were the socio-economic winners. Pensioners, workers, collective farmers, the unemployed youth were the big losers along with the formerly subsidized cultural artists. Military bases in Eastern Europe became the empire’s first line of military attack of Russia and the target of any counter-attack.

If we measure the consequences of the shift in imperial power, it is clear that the Eastern Europe countries have become even more subservient under the US and the EU than under Russia . Western induced financial crises have devastated their economies; Eastern European troops have served in more imperial wars under NATO than under Soviet rule; the cultural media are under Western commercial control. Most of all, the degree of imperial control over all economic sectors far exceeds anything that existed under the Soviets. The Eastern European ‘grass roots’ movement succeeded in deepening and extending the US Empire; the advocates of peace, social justice , national independence, a cultural renaissance and social welfare with democracy were the big losers.

Western liberals, progressives and leftists who fell in love with imperialist promoted “anti-imperialism” are also big losers. Their support for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia led to the break-up of a multi-national state and the creation of huge NATO military bases and a white slavers paradise in Kosova. Their blind support for the imperial promoted “liberation” of Eastern Europe devastated the welfare state, eliminating the pressure on Western regimes’ need to compete in providing welfare provisions. The main beneficiaries of Western imperial advances via ‘grass roots’ uprisings were the multi-national corporations, the Pentagon and the rightwing free market neo-liberals.As the entire political spectrum moved to the right a sector of the left and progressives eventually jumped on the bandwagon. The Left moralists lost credibility and support, their peace movements dwindled, and their “moral critiques” lost resonance. The left and progressives who tail-ended the imperial backed “grass roots movements”, whether in the name of “anti-Stalinism”, “pro-democracy” or “anti-imperialism” have never engaged in any critical reflection; no effort to analyze the long-term negative consequences of their positions in terms of the losses in social welfare, national independence or personal dignity.

The long history of imperialist manipulation of “anti-imperialist” narratives has found virulent expression in the present day. The New Cold War launched by Obama against China and Russia, the hot war brewing in the Gulf over Iran’s alleged military threat, the interventionist threat against Venezuela’s “drug-networks”, and Syria’s “bloodbath” are part and parcel of the use and abuse of “anti-imperialism” to prop up a declining empire. Hopefully, the progressive and leftist writers and scribes will learn from the ideological pitfalls of the past and resist the temptation to access the mass media by providing a ‘progressive cover’ to imperial dubbed “rebels”. It is time to distinguish between genuine anti-imperialism and pro-democracy movements and those promoted by Washington, NATO and the mass media.

By Prof. James Petras

The Truth Should Be Told,Before My Eyes Finally Close In Death.Credo Mutwa

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:45:00 +0000

"My greatest wish, honorable friends, is that the truth should be told, before my eyes finally close in death. Last night, I thought at long last, I would find the rest I need. I cannot live in a world where there is so much evil, a world at the same time which has so much potential for good.

I demand it of the nations of the world: stop looting Africa. Stop defiling my motherland. Listen to Africa, please. Listen to the race already under sentence of death by American, British and whatever scientists.

We have been sentenced to death without being given a chance to plead in our own defense. We have been condemned like unwanted dogs. A disease was made specifically to destroy us. We have never been given a chance.

Before the judgment seat of whatever imaginary God there may be, I demand that Africa should be given a hearing. I demand that Africa should not be destroyed until she has had her fullest chance to plead in her defense. Even a criminal standing on the very edge of a scaffold, still has a chance to speak in his or her defense.

Africa... Africa has much to contribute to the world. And I speak as one who, through no cleverness of my own, but through the blind hand of fate, I have been to many places in this world.

Don’t ask me about Japan. I know those fragrant islands. Don’t ask me about Hawaii, I was there. Don’t ask me about ... about Peru, about that mighty lake called Titicaca, where my African lungs could barely breathe.

I want Africa to be given a fair hearing by the nations of the world before she is destroyed, because we are being destroyed. America, Britain, and whatever monstrous creatures are skulking behind those nations, have sentenced my people to death.

But we Africans are the golden link that connects all humanity together. We should be listened to. We have got a case to plead at the foot of the judgment seat of cruel humanity.

I have lived. I have traveled. I feel no sense of achievement. I just feel a great sorrow that a human... a nation, can sentence another nation to death, like so much vermin.

My wife of 40 years is dead. The woman who presented me with eight children is gone. My eyes are haunted by the memory of death."

I, Credo Mutwa, have no right to breathe the air of this Earth. I should die and go, go to hell in a bucket, for all I care. But the truth must be spoken through these lips before they are silenced forever.

AIDS, aids and war depopulating Africa by day.

Our ancestor's never had any known tragedy transmitted through sex,

therefore anything transmitted through sex has nothing to do with us

but those who defined us.

Our ancestors had no debts, therefore debts have nothing to do with us

but those who defined us.

Africa had no "borders", therefore the artificial lines have nothing

to do with us but those who defined us.

It's time we went back to our roots without any apologies for the sake

of our future!.Wangui Munyi-Vanselow

These people are dead. There's death around them somewhere, which is the reason they are deadly as a people, why every advance of knowledge for them is an advancement in the knowledge of destruction. Every advancement in knowledge

is an advancement in the ability to kill and destroy the earth, kill and destroy nature, kill and destroy others, rape and rob the earth of its wealth, people and life forms, so much so that now they are having great difficulty even reproducing themselves. At the very center of their lives is death and destruction."Amos N. Wilson ,Afrikan-Centered Consciousness Versus The New World Order

Celebrate With Us March 10,Harriet Tubman Day And Remember a Great Lady

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:30:00 +0000

1820 – Mar 10, 1913 .Celebrate with us on March 10, Harriet Tubman Day and remember a great lady.

One somewhat predictable element to Tubman’s escapes was they usually began Saturday night to take advantage of Sunday, the typical day off, and to push news reports of the escape into the next week.

Harriet was born into slavery. At five, her master began renting her out as a laborer to surrounding neighbors. She was often whipped and beaten and developed a reputation for being a defiant but hard worker, who was better at outdoor field work than anything indoors. When she was a teen, she tried to prevent an overseer from punishing a runaway slave. The enraged overseer hit her on the head with a two-pound weight, which put her into a coma. After recovering, she suffered from sleeping fits, or random blackouts, for the rest of her life. She escaped north to freedom on the Underground Railroad in 1849 and vowed to help other slaves escape. At the risk of her own life, she made 19 trips into the South and brought more than 300 slaves to freedom. Despite her blackouts and illiteracy, she never lost a “passenger” on the Underground Railroad. Once, to disguise herself, she pretended to be reading a book (just hoping she was holding it right side up). The men looking for her walked by commenting that the one they were looking for couldn’t read. Rewards totaling up to $40,000 were offered for her capture. She eventually helped her own ten siblings and parents to freedom. During the Civil War, she served as a nurse, scout and spy for the Union Army but never received compensation for her hard and dangerous work. After the war, Harriet raised money for black machines and was tireless in her efforts to improve situations for the blacks. She set up a home for elderly and needy blacks. Still carrying the scars of slavery on her back, she stopped in 1913 at the age of 93.

Harriet Tubman Fact

1. Harriet Tubman was born on the Eastern shore of Maryland, in Dorchester County.

Near Cambridge, Maryland.

2. Harriet Tubman's birth name was Araminta Ross, her nick name was Minty.

3. Harriet Tubman's mother's name was Harriet Green, what was her nickname? Old Rit.

4. Harriet Tubman's father's name was Benjamin Ross. Daddy Ben they called him.

5. There were 9 children in Harriet Tubman's family. Some books say 11 children, I think that her sister's children left behind when her sister was sold where sometimes counted as siblings.

6. Sarah Bradford wrote the book, " Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Published in 1869. She actually interviewed Harriet Tubman.

7. Harriet Tubman was married to John Tubman when she was about 24 years old. John was a free black man.

8. Harriet Tubman has 8 siblings, 4 sisters: Linih, Mariah Ritty, Soph, and Rachel

and 4 brothers, Robert, Henry, Benjamin, Moses.

9. Harriet Tubman's Faith in God is what she held onto and he kept her safe.

10. Harriet Tubman never had any children.

11. Harriet Tubman freed herself in the fall of 1849. Then she went back into the South 19 times to free others.

12. When Harriet Tubman found out that she had crossed the Mason Dixon Line and she was free, she said, " I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free, there was such glory over everything, the sun came up like gold through the threes, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven."

13. Harriet Tubman was able to get her brothers and her parents free before the war.

14. Harriet Tubman had many friends. One was Thomas Garret a Quaker in Wilmington, Delaware. Mr. Garret help black people escape slavery on the Underground Railroad for 30 years and helped 3000 people.

15. William Still was a free black man in Philadelphia, he kept records of all the black people who have made it to freedom and helped them find their families, and start a new life.

16. Frederick Douglass, who was from the same part of Maryland as Harriet Tubman was also a friend and she stayed in his home in Buffalo, New York on many occasions.

17. Harriet Tubman was a spy, scout and a nurse during the Civil War.

18. Harriet Tubman was the first woman in the United States to plan and lead a gun raid.

19. Harriet Tubman was the first woman in the United States to serve behind enemy lines.

20. Harriet Tubman also was a dynamic public speaker and storyteller. She traveled around the New England states and spoke against slavery.

21. Harriet Tubman led a rescue of a man, Charles Nalle who lived in Troy, New York. His white brother was trying to take him back to the South as his slave.

22. Negro spirituals were sang as a way of coping with the sorrows of slavery and as a form of communication.

23. Harriet Tubman was know as the Moses of her people. Go Down Moses, is a song she used to communicate her coming and going.

24. John Brown referred to Harriet Tubman as General Tubman.

25. After 1850, Harriet Tubman and others would not feel safe until they were under the paw of the British Lion. In other words, until they were in Canada.

26. Harriet Tubman was a disabled person. She had Narcolepsy or sleeping spells. She could fall asleep any time and any place. This was caused by a blow to the head by a 2-pound iron weight thrown at another slave, but it hit Harriet in the head when she was about 15 years old.

27. Harriet Tubman served in South Carolina, under Colonel Montgomery, she and 300 free black soldiers on 3 gun boats, led a raid and freed about 800 people without l of the Union soldiers killed.

28. Harriet Tubman lived to be 93 years old. Harriet Tubman died on March 10, 1913.

29. Harriet Tubman spent her last years in a convalescent home she established in Auburn New York.

30. President George Bush proclaimed Harriet Tubman Day on March 10, 1990.

31. Celebrate with me on March 10, Harriet Tubman Day and remember a great lady.

“If you hear the dogs,keep going.If you see the torches in the woods,keep going.If there's shouting after you, keep going. Don't ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”

― Harriet Tubman

Within all of us exists the spirit of Harriet Tubman. In many instances, we rise to a challenge much the same way as did Harriet Tubman when she was leading slaves through the treacherous Underground Railroad. But, few men or women in history have risen to the level of achievement that was truly exemplified by the sacrifice, life and spirit of Harriet Tubman.

HOW WE CAN RESTORE THE DIGNITY OF THE BLACK PEOPLE AROUND THE GLOBE STARTS WITH UNTING TO CORRECT HIS ANCESTRAL BASE

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:25:00 +0000

LANGUAGELIBERATION IS THE LIBERATION OF THOUGHT

Language is an instrument ofsociety cohesion; it is an instrument of idea formation and language liberationis the liberation of the mind

The utmost thing Afrika needs to do in the correction of her barren idea is to seek language liberation. On which stare of life’s ladder would Afrika betoday had her fifty four states embraced one common language that was Afrikan,spoke what was black Afrikan, expressed the true meaning of Afrika in bothtones and deeds in all her acts and derived from Afrikan man’s environment,believes and traditions; all but different from the language of the oppressorwho is the former colonial master on independency day; even in their respectivestates alone? Speak up Oholibah the Afrikan church! What would have happened tothe children of Israel had they heed Gods directive and not courted and orcopied the traditions, practices, culture and believes from their uncle(Esau’s) descendants that God had settled at the hilly country of Seir? Whatwould have happened had Afrikan state’s founding fathers refused to copy andpick language, traditions, culture and gods of the departing colonial master atLancaster; and courted one derived from own Afrikan nation’s backyard? May be the colonial demarcated borders would have been broken a half a centuryago and for sure we could not be experiencing daily births of unproductivestones called states but which do not pass the test of being called states andor nations in the fact of God. To try and explain professor Molefi Asante inhis from Afro centricity to the Afrikan ear and or context, an ideology forAfrikan liberation must find its existence in us. It cannot be external to us,and it cannot be imported by those other than ourselves. It must be derivedfrom our peculiar black Afrikan historical and cultural experience. Ourliberation from the captivity of the colonial language must be the first order ofthe Afrikan intellectual. As Lorenzo Turner put it “There can be no freedomuntil there is freedom of the mind”. Language essentially is the control ofthought. For a more than a half a century since independence, Afrikan statesand or Afrika has failed to own her future by failing to control her languagethence her barren idea being the child of her vague idea control. The colonialmaster’s language has but boxed us into the colonial mater’s concept. That iswhy we try had and spend good time searching for perfection so that we act andtalk like the Whiteman, drink, eat, dress, conduct and carry ourselves aroundAfrikan towns like the Whiteman. Fly, drive and dine the colonial style forthat is the expression of superiority, prestige and real power as we learnedfrom the departing colonial master’s antics. The language that we should seekas Afrikans must possess instrumentality, which is it must be able to dosomething for the second liberation of the Afrikan child; for Afrika.Liberation is fundamentally the seizure of instruments of control. If languageis un functional, then it should have no place in our Afrikan vocabulary. Inevery revolution, the people have first sized the instrument of idea formationwhich is ideally intellectual and spiritual conquest then property production;a baby child of any social political conquest. We have failed to learn fromhistory. During the American Revolution, Americathe state was born during the Boston tea partywhere the rebels took liberty and parliamentarian representation and gave themdefinitions foreign to the colonial ruling class then Great Britain.It is the only tried and tested route to any genuine revolution commitment.There is no short cut to the Promised Land ooh mother Afrika. The utmost thingAfrika needs to do in the correction of her barren idea is to seek languageliberation Different languages within the same borders breeds different anddiverse thoughts impeding the path to that nation’s one idea hence the usualtendency of Afrikan nations having a two dozen ideas where there is two dozenethnic groupings found within the same borders. More often than not, thedominant tribes or ethnic block which happen to be the majority in numbersdominate the country in question in the control of everything that dictates thedirection that country will take both socially, politically and economically.Over 360 years before the good Christ took over human body and came to thisworld, a short cut to 300 meter high Sinai was sought. 1800 stairs wereconstructed right from the oldest church at the foot of Mount Sinai with intent to reach Moses’s cafe on top of Sinai. Man’slittle wisdom had deceived him and he never sought wisdom from high tounderstand why Moses God’s chosen servant used to zigzag the steeps of MountSinai right to the cafe; fast for forty days for God to deliver the chosenpeople Israelto the Promised Land. It never happened. The same had been tried up Babel ridgewhere man tried to rely on the little wisdom he had to reach the mountain ofcongregation, the mountain of the lord with intend to share his glory only tobe scattered in an instant by separation of dialect another weapon from God’sbarn of division and control. Wisdom is good with an inheritance and with itthere is profit to them that see the sun. Power is a defence, ethnic and triballordship is a sure defence to the ethnic Afrikan throne, money is a defense,even the act of Afrikan elected governments using the local administration tostrike fear in the Afrikan local Joe to forever see a god man in them isanother sure defense. Pride is a defence and ignorance that you have imposedonto the shoulders of the Afrikan child is also a defence; but the knowledge ofwisdom is that it gives live to those who have live

Afrikan nations and Afrika are in dire need of a mobilizing language. Alanguage that will elevate black Afrikan nationalism above ethinicim, abovetribalism, nepotism, religious sects, black Afrikan mysticism and social classdistinctions. A nationalism that will finally counteract ethnic divisions andthe porass Afrikan social class. It is the high time every Afrikan child fromblack merchant to laborer, from commercial sex worker to street children, fromintellectual to illiterate, from aspiring socialist to aspiring capitalist,from Christian to Muslim and from cultists to mysticism: to search for a newblack Afrikan language that will finally mobilize the Afrikan child’sconsciousness. Only then shall our national cause become the principle interestof the people of Afrika; of the Afrikan child as other interests becomesubordinate considerations. For our language as Afrikans will provide us withthe understanding of our reality. Armed with that essential instrument ofsocial cohesion, and then shall the fundamental element of Afrika’s finalliberation begotten. Let us build a language of truth. A language that willdefine one entity and collectiveness in Afrika. A language upon whose base weshall finally erect the pyramid of the Afrikan dream; upon whose highest peakwill fly the Afrikan flag of identity and prosperity. The pyramid upon whosewalls we shall display the smiling face of the Afrikan child, and a pyramidwhose foundation will be laid on a cornerstone of progressive black Afrikanconsciousness and national liberation. This will be adequate actions throughwhich we can be able to communicate to the world. The pyramid will serve as asymbol of our national will to liberty and thus progressiveness. And with oneor two main and common languages, then we will be able to propagate amid ourrich diverse culture, same views and same senses. Even if our diverse culturehinders us from being one society, the chances of having two are high. Languageis an instrument of social cohesion. There is no liberation until there is liberationof the mind.

We shall talk of federations and unions till the sun grows old until we findout what has become the stumbling block to realizing this much sought unity.The East Afrikan federation for example will only be a good idea after Rwanda, Burundiaccepted to introduce Swahili which is spoken in Kenya, Tanzania and is quicklyreplacing Luganda which comes with Baganda tribal glory as a silently acceptednational language in the country Uganda, to their people; notably in theirinstitutions of higher learning and senior secondary schools.(Kiswahili isintroduced in the country Uganda’s syllabus from senior one level or form oneto those of us who are perfectionists of the colonial masters verb andculture.) It will only save the much yearned and but elusive fruit at thecentre of the garden when East Afrikan brothers discover that eating from theSwahili tree in our schools will make the more than one forty millioninhabitants of these federation feel more cohesive day by day and be at home withone another. Then shall they willingly share their culture believes andtraditions; as they enjoy their fruit of oneness, and through the unity that alanguage of their own, one derived from Afrikan environment, with chosenacceptable words to all tribes in the East Afrikan borders which correctlyexpress their East Afrikan idea derived from East Afrikan thinking, bonded byEast Afrikan culture, traditions and believes; will they cohesively findthemselves routed in a cast of their choice. The East Afrikan cast. Then shall they experience a baptismal change intheir current thinking and tribal and ethnic idea formation for one spokenlanguage which essentially is an instrument of idea formation would haveelevated their tribal ideas to national idea, individual state’s idea to thefederation’s idea. It will be a new thinking that will override their currentbelieves and insecurity between them, between their many tribes, ethnicgroupings and different ideologies if any; Born of different tribal, ethnic andnational languages hence different casts they have found themselves routed in.Without this, we are only trying to build a tower of Babelwith all one hundred thousand brick layers, architects and sand harvesterstalking in one hundred thousand different dialects. Surely, understanding willnot occur for the vital communication will not just be elusive but will be deadand buried. Communication is the meeting of meaning. When my meaning meets yourmeaning across the bridge of tones deeds and acts, and when understandingoccurs, we have communicated. The rest is a church congregation all talking athousand different tongues but with no one to interpret. It becomes unnecessarynoise not just in the eyes of men but in the fact of God. Ask prophet Isaiah.

The young generation of Afrika is trying to shape her tomorrow by trying inall the fifty four Afrikan states to size, humanize and own every language theyhave come across, whether local or curved out of their former colonialmaster’s language. I need no proof better than history and experience to pointout that the very colonial languages forced through the lips of the inhabitantsof the fifty four half hazardly created borders of Afrikan Nations a half acentury ago are not the same languages that are spoken today. What NicolasGullen did to Spanish, Nigerian brothers through the upcoming Nollywood havebeen working hard day and night on Nigerian “AKS” English. That is after theireffort to own pignee English curved out of distortion and modification of meaningof words between colonial English and local Nigerian main dialects notablydominant Hausa and Ibo, in the early 90’s failed. What Lovington Hughes did toEnglish, the larger population that make up Afrika’s fifty four nations havetried to work on their respective societies by evidently sizing alanguage they fill best identified with; derived from own history Afrikanculture traditions and environment. Tanzania should be applauded for being theonly country in the larger Afrikan nation to have not only humanized Kiswahiliinto BONGO language to breath more Tanzanian and close home and thence creatinga new Bongo culture, defining a Bongo environment; whose made new inhabitantsBongo people of the Bongo society expresses their Bongo ideawhich is without distortion and all clear to every child born of the Bongofamily and her gentiles alike in believes of Unduguism (brotherhood) vis-a-visBongo tradition that evidently have wiped off the board the sixty fivedifferent culture’s believes and traditions hence sixty five ideas that awhile ago came with the sixty five plus Tanzania’s ethnic divide. They havetaken fully command of it hence can direct their tomorrow through “Unduguism”shaping it from their culture, environment, believes and traditions givingbirth to the New Bongo national Anthem. What Aime Cesaire did to French, DrcCongo have curved out Lingala before the invasion of Kiswahili from the East(Swahili speakers in Congo Kinshasa are referred to as Easterners, aliens orforeigners; a big plus to the Pierre Pemba’s of Afrika who have benefiteddirectly from the seeds of divisiveness and separation created by uncle Sam theold master of trickery.) Even newly born South Afrika have realized that it isin the soul of her people to size and redefine Afrikaner largely a baby childof the populous Zulu community and the Boer language towards liberalizing ideasand thought and the naked fact that it can only be found in the souls of theSouth Afrikan masses. Humanizing Luganda, the mother language of the Bagandatribe out of the many tribes in Uganda and her silent acceptance by all tribesand or people that make up the larger country Uganda suggests that it is in thesouls of the people of Uganda to size and redirect any language that they sofeel will lead them towards realizing the Ugandan idea and thought, hencekeeping the engine of the final revolution not only in the country Uganda butthe whole of Afrika alive and kicking. It is the humanizing of GENGE cultureborn in some dark licking shelters of East Leigh, lowly “California”suburb driven by “Lugha ya vijana wa mtaa” after their efforts tohumanize Sheng in the early 90s failed; that kept Kenya from going to HotelRwanda during the flawed December 07 elections. The country Kenya should countherself twice lucky not to have gone the Rwandan way, not because she hadgood sound leadership but because she hard a knew voting block who will notface north because their leaders think north. Who don’t see their neighbor,school mate workmate and estate mate basing on the ethnic eye butnational. Those who see each other as belonging to the larger tribe Kenya, the larger tribe Uganda and the larger tribe that is Bongo whoseJacob skin was Tanzaniaa little while ago. (Majority born after 1964, the year trickery UncleSam retreated to his country across the Atlantic and are in no way indebted tohis old tricks and gods hence does not belong to those whose scripts dates backto colonial era; beliefs and way of doing things.) Apart from Tanzaniawhose revolutionary BONGO language has ignited a social revolution thathas slowly planted and watered the tenets that have seen Tanzanian youngsociety run away from Tanzania the country there fore founding fathers planted;the name Tanzania itself curved from mainland Tanganyika and island Azania(Zanzibar) all to mean the union of the two aforementioned into a Bongonation speaking Bongo language; an instrument of choice that have cohesivelybonded the once ethnically divided union to speak one language send one commontone, perform different deeds appreciate conserve and practice one culture thatis been filtered to be acceptable to all “Bongorians” if you readfrom the new Afrikan dictionary being written by the generation which hadno direct touch with the gods and believes of the colonial pharaoh; and acts asthey lift their eyes up to higher glory in their silent torch of libertysomewhere in Dare salaam which is coincidentally an Arabic word which means aplace of peace; and yes it has. The Bongo language drummed by Bongo musiciansand the upcoming Bongo movie industry, is slowly becoming a hot cake inAfrika after overrunning Eastern Afrika like charging wild beasts fromthe Serengeti crossing the crocodile infested Mara river and has transformedthe sixty five ethnic groupings that make up Tanzania into one Bongo tribespeaking one Bongo language, all but proud of their new culture Bongo notforgetting the Bongo environment hence one Bongo idea all but looking up theirsilent invisible tower of liberty down Dare salaam.

Yes, Afrikan youths through art and music derived from tenets which are morehome and Afrikan are communicating what is burning in their hearts. They haverealized that our Afrikan founding fathers gave away that pillar that held theAfrikan child together. The pillar whose glory would have cohesively bonded theAfrikan child’s idea into one strong force, the day they disregarded afrocentricity for euro centricity. The breakdown of Afrikan states represents onemassive slide away from the Afrikan centre. Afrikan nations are founded onimported ideologies. We have adopted all symbols and behaviors of decadentwestern societies instead of modeling our Afrikan governments on thetraditional values and patterns of our people. We instead were deceived intothe systems which have only been tested and proven in western countriesforgetting that those systems were made to be so or realized following thecohesiveness of God given glory that is only found in their culture andtraditions hence an environment they were familiar with; befitting the cast oftheir choice. We failed to realize that it was not worthy embracing them in ournew black Afrikan environment, whose culture, traditions were ocean apart. Ourbrothers and sisters in Nigerian Nolly hood, her baby child Bongo Movieindustry and Ghanaian film industry have but been trying to rekindle the lightthat will finally guide and direct the lost pigeon of Afrika’s village templecalled black consciousness that seem to have once lived with Bantu Stephen Bikoand died with Bantu Stephen Biko;(Do my South Afrikan brothers remember him?)into the Afrikan child. Their drums are only shouting to our deaf Afrikan earthat our blood is Afrikan and not Asian, not American and not western. “Damuyangu ni ya Bongo si ya Asia.” borrowed lines from Bongo’s Marlow; and their guitars are only demanding forAfrika’s return to her basic black principles which always placed as atthe centre in cohesive kingdoms and chiefdom hoods before the ghosts of UncleLaban came into Afrikan Moses’s lives. They are only telling us to come back tothe basics, seek to modify our Afrikan traditions, and from the fallen pillarthat was once Afrika’s black centre, re do and re shape it so that it can meetthe demands of a modern Afrikan society. They are but calling for thedisintegration of our collective imported consciousness and though painfullybut joyfully with sure steps however nail slow to introduce afro centricitywhich is so necessary to put off the white man’s candle and replace it with theblack man’s candle whose light however deem will awaken our black Afrikanpostures and drive our Afrikan consciousness. We aren’t going anywhere as longas we run our Afrikan states on more than a dozen un provable bases. It is timewe accepted the obvious fact that when we courted euro centricity, we chose thewrong path as we embarked on some one else’s talk; our twin brother Esau’swalk. The black Afrikan bus took the wrong direction. We have to make a U- turnback to the start point. Our path should have been Afro centricity. It wasclearly marked from the beginning but as a race and Afrikan family, we failedto acquaint ourselves with the operation map and neither did we look up to thebill board. We failed the road test right from the beginning and the blackrally car took the wrong direction. The co- driver failed the litmus test byabandoning the driver; his blood brother just before the first check point. Wehave to reverse the Afrikan black car down hill right to the bridge. The hillis too steep to climb with the wrong gear we engaged at the bridge and that istrue in the fact of God. You cannot ascend the steep slopes of the Himalayaswith gear five. Hail our Indian brothers, who have become a living example byrallying around the Ganges, whose cohesiveness has ensured that they worshipIndian culture, believes and traditions as expressed in Bolly Hood tone, theirsocial cohesion level on civilization ladder.

From down the city Dare salaam meaning a place of peace in kisisima, motherAfrika’s re creative intelligence is urging the Afrikan child to mention to theface of the black gods of Afrika that it is him who have changed since theunion flag came down. But he is still the same Israelite brother that he had tofight and kill the Egyptian master for as the biblical Moses did to an Egyptianfor mistreating and enslaving Israel his bloody brother who was also a child ofthe promise; and one he once appreciated and saw a brother in before the birthof colonialism; when their Afrikan traditions, culture and believes bonded themtogether cohesively in kingdoms and chiefdoms. He is telling Afrika’s modernneocolonialist that however much he tire him under the York of blackimperialism, he is still his former desk mate, class mate, playmate; hisbrother at arms in the freedom struggle and a former class mate. ”Unanikumbuka,ila tu unaleta ukaidi. Mimi ni Yule Yule, tulisoma wote kidato kimoja”. Borrowedlines T JT, AS Jua Cali from the other high dominating GENGE ground istelling mother Afrika to seek a certificate of divorce for she did not wedAfrika’s chosen pride at Lancaster but her flower girl and her best maid. He istelling the Afrikan consumer intelligence to say good by to Leah for Rachel wasthe chosen pride.” “Nakutakia kilaheri, kukupenda mi siwezi mpenzi kwaheri”.

Languageliberation is the liberation of thought

Was not the unity of tongue first put to test on babble ridge when Goddiscovered that it was the oneness of the tongue that communicated onecontrolled thought; the instrument of control and cohesiveness being onelanguage thence communicated one understandable desire whose result wascertified through one deed and single act aimed at meeting the demand of thewill of the people of the earth as expressed in one tone. The result was a talltower that could have enabled man to fulfill his desired dream of not justdiscovering where him who created him dwelled, but get to the mountain ofcongregation and share his glory only for God out of his wisdom to choose the rightbarn that holds the sword of division that became separation of the tongue andor dialect which begot colour difference and destroyed cohesiveness of manthen, and his unmerged control of thought.

The oppressor language has quickly condemned the antinodes with whichto measure the distance the Afrikan child has traveled on the ladder ofcivilization and our former colonial master’s language became a scale withwhich to measure the learnedness of an individual. The Sjambok language; thelanguage of the founders hence gods of the effendis. Language being aninstrument of idea control, adopting the language derived from colonialmaster’s environment, history and traditions meant the Afrikan child cedes hishistory, his culture and his traditions and subsequently embarked on thecolonial master’s path, the imperial walk; Esau’s talk. The Afrikan child uponloosing her instrument of social cohesion, the existing social structures ofkingdom hood and chiefdom hood which comparatively came with slightly higherglory was discarded and both entities stripped to ethnic groupings, tribal andclan entities which came with lower casts were watered and made to flourish atall costs. Ethnic grouping sounds of higher cast on paper though but the ironyis it can disintegrate further into lower glories but chiefdom and kingdomhowever narrow forever remain more cohesive and one. That is how mother Afrikalost control over her traditions, her culture and her environment. Her historyand future became dictated and directed by the colonial master’s culture andtraditions and gods. On allowing the colonial master who was alien to ourculture and traditions to write our Afrikan history for us, we lost controlover our culture, over our Afrikan environment and traditions.

For example the lameness and ineffectiveness of the Genge idea to the Kenyanconsumer intelligence is the opposite that Bongo has had on the East Afrikanconsumer block. To the more than one hundred and forty million Swahili speakersfound in central and Eastern Afrika. Bongo controlled the Afrikan brother andcommunicated fully and home his will, despair, dream and wish from aninstrument of idea control, cohesion, social control and thought drawn from theAfrikan brothers own environment, culture and believes thence home andacceptable to majority Afrikan ear giving birth to the elusive understanding wehave in vain sought for close to forty years to no Vail. This is largelybecause the instrument of social cohesion in Bongo language is more home andcloser to the Afrikan heart than Genge. Bongo has shown a higher level ofemancipation from the chains of the colonial gods, culture, traditions andbelieves. Bongo sounds more Afrikan and closer home to the ground the Afrikanchild is familiar with. It has made the most threatening stride in being on theforefront of crushing foreign obstacles that was inherited from the tables ofLancaster in colonial masters trickery of planting, watering, distortion andmodification of meaning of Afrikan words as from their culture, traditions andenvironment in his bet to permanently check Afrikan colonies/ people fromattaining a spiritual revolution via slowing down the wheels and spirit of their intellectual revolution, where as Genge whose cracks in theKenyan society as expressed in tribal suspicions and ethnic divisiveness asdemonstrated in December 2007 scar, is a sure indicator of the short distancetraveled by the Kenyan society in freeing themselves from colonial mastersdistortion of meaning of the Kenyan collective idea. Kenyans has been condemnedto waste their energy that they would have put into national building intofighting the modification of meaning of words in the Kerinyaga nation. That isthe reason behind the shunning of the country by any serious investor. That iswhy her East Afrikan neighbor states which were way behind as compared to thecountry Kenya in the field of economic growth and the gross domestic productsince independence is quickly catching up as Kenya degenerates into the mostinsecure country in the East Afrikan block. In a way, the Baganda tribe’slanguage Luganda has brought more cohesion among Ugandan tribes than Englishhas to Kenya largely because her gods are tribal but next door to every Ugandaneye derived from the gods’ traditions and culture they know. Deny the fact ofGod oh Kenyan elites and learned fellows that the level of cohesiveness in theUgandan society is closer as compared to the Kenyan equation. Compare thepolitical tone that came with the handling of the MIGINGO ISLANDaffair between the Kenyan politician vide his political lip verses his Ugandancounterpart and you wont help realizing the Godly fact that the Ugandanpolitician’s lip in handling the MIGINGO CASE camewith more restraint than his Kenyan counterpart. Even the Ugandan localpeasant living across the border sounded mature and so no need to fight and orquarrel over a rocky island in lake Victoria when we were brothers whose peopleshared so many things in common; and especially when the east Afrikan politicalwind was at last pointing the grid direction of an East Afrikan federation. Onthe other hand, his Kenyan counterpart was busy drumming war drums from Kenya’shighest ground as led by the Kenyan politician perfectly molded by the gods ofMount Lancaster. Any turmoil in the country Uganda is bound to arise fromideological differences, whether village or national and not from the evilsatanic ethnic shoot that is Kenya. What has suddenly started the exodus ofKenyan school children into Ugandan institutions of higher learning? Has it notbeen necessitated by the Godly fact that the common basic needs of any Ugandancitizen in food, clothing and shelter in the coat of education are within reachto the common peasant which is the direct opposite to the situation on theKenyan side? Is Sheng not the mostly spoken amongst the youths in the countryKenya which humanized colonial English at independency but made Swahili anothernational language and has it not confused the Kenyan child further to foreverfight for his identity? Is it not a product of distortion of meaning of wordsbetween colonial English and indigenous kikuyu and is it not silently acceptedas a national language in the country Kenya? Or does Matatu/Mathree notderived from “EMathathu” which means three in kikuyu dialect as Kariokorto great corner, Kawangare to come to the quarry, Isili toEast Leigh and Hoyt’s bridge to “Moi’s bridge”? For example the gapbetween Tanzania’s Bongo culture and Kenya’s Genge vis a vis the ratio ofthe ethnic wound between the three East Afrikan neighbors is the naked fact to the ear of any East Afrikan Joshua’s generation thatwhereas Bongo tones have and are addressing national culture; promoting theEast Afrikan culture as expressed in an East Afrikan and larger Afrikan owndeed as derived from an East Afrikan and thus Afrikan own environment, history,culture, and traditions in the way the larger Afrikan tribe will want itto reach their ear in an acceptable universal tone and the way the rest of theworld should define and read the Afrikan yearn, dreams as they translate theAfrikan idea, whereas Genge tones derived from Genge culture has been busycementing, watering, promoting and thus advocating tribal cohesiveness,drumming ethnic tones and corrupting the would be Kenya’s national toneand forever ensuring that tribal tones and ethnic deeds are acceptable to thenational tables thus divisive acts. Bongo has been addressing the largerAfrikan cultural conservation when Genge tones has and are addressing tribalclan and ethnic conservation, cementing tribal deeds on national level as theyboob trap their respective tribal and ethnic entities as if with orders to doso from the Amen’s of Afrika for fear of being infiltrated by other perceivedto be hostile neighboring tribes and ethnic culture seen as a destructiveantigen that will tear and eat their tribal, ethnic and tribal cohesion fromwithin. Genge tones have been reaching the ear of East Afrikan consumerintelligence who again are the masses and dejected voices from the marginsdistorted, divisive thence creating the need for the East Afrikan child toinvest big in order to comprehend. It is not fully home and Afrikan and itstones don’t sound unifying and have come to depict the separation of thenational tone in the country Kenya. This is so because the colonial verb hasforever taken a permanent place in the minds and lives of the Kenyan childthat to every Kenyan whether young or old, learned or illiterate, nostatement is complete without a colonial verb and that is the tragedy; nostatement is complete without a colonial verb as Ham’s children to the tent ofShem and that is the Afrikan tragedy. As the Afrikan child to the tent of thecolonial master and that is the Conspiracy. It has proved a sure thermometerwith which to measure the level on the ladder of national and statecohesiveness as expressed in each East Afrikan state’s tone and has proved thatthe Kenyan tone has lagged behind Bongo tone which is national and Ugandan tonewhich though can be described as Bagandan because it expresses Baganda tribesact is on a relatively higher stair of society cohesion compared to Kenyalargely because it is derived from a Baganda tribal culture and environment. Itis more home and nearer any Ugandan heart that Ugandan brothers and sistersneed not invest big in colonial masters idea formation instrument to understandthe tones of the guy next door. In other words, Bongo tones have been reachingthe ear of the East Afrikan child in the way East Afrikanconsumer intelligence, both young and old, educated and uneducated, richand common peasant aspiring capitalist to aspiring socialist, merchant andlaborer understands. Bongo drums have always sounded in a tone that defines thecommon Tanzanian and Eastern Afrikan deed aimed to achieving and or attaining auniversal East Afrikan and Tanzanian collective act and does not have a verbderived from the colonial master’s mirror. That is how Jacob became Israel,Abram became Abraham, and Saul became Paul as Tanzania Became Bongo. Ugandanart and music industry however low and of tribal glory, derived from theBaganda engine and or cornerstone vis a vis culture and traditions and thusensuring the country Uganda forever bow to and dance to the whims of theBaganda tribal glory have sounded more closer home and Ugandan to every Ugandanand East Afrikan consumer intelligence than Kenya’s Genge largely becausewhereas Genge culture has still sounded a tone that is still wallowing in thecolonial masters concept and thus has imprisoned and ensured the Kenyan tonedoes not reach the common Kenyan Joe without a verb derived from the colonialmaster’s instrument of social cohesion, idea formation and control of thought. Uganda’sBaganda tone is close to all Ugandan brothers and it is derived from anenvironment and culture that is though alien but one which they are familiarand thence feels more home with than colonial English whose gods are oceansapart. That is the reason why the ethnic tension that has forever condemned thecountry Kenya toforever sit like a dormant volcano is non existent in the country Uganda.However, it is a phenomena which has been relegated to Tanzania’s history booksthe day the exoskeleton that was Tanzania and which stood for the countriessixty five tribal glories was shed and a coat of higher national glory calledBongo was adopted to be the prime mover of all Tanzanian form of lives. Thedisparity has thus proved that better off are those Afrikan country whoseleadership courted a local instrument of thought however low and tribal the dayflag independence came than those countries which embraced the colonial mastersinstrument of idea formation which has forever ensured that citizens of suchAfrikan countries always feel insecure and always hold with disdain anythingthat is home and Afrikan because they are in Afrika physically but their mindshave been boxed to forever dream western and live in the colonial mastersdream. The study has also proved beyond doubt that those Afrikan countries inwhose borders were grouped lesser ethnic and or tribes are more prone to ethnicmayhem that has become the face of Afrika when compared to those countries inwhose borders will be found more tribes. This is because the more the tribesfound within those artificial colonial drawn borders, the lesser the chances ofthem striking one collective tone with which they would have used to smoke outthe tribal tyranny of the tribe in power given the fact that their will existmore tribal glories striving for dominance at the national idea molding tablesin the artificial state in question. Those countries with two or three tribesand or ethnic groups found within their borders always have two and or lesserwarring and tribal forces which fight themselves for dominance on the countriesidea molding tables, watering the usual ethnic suspicion and booby trapping oftribal fences an act which has ensured Afrikan ethnic daggers and tribal bowsnever live the table. In other words, the Rwandan genocide would have noteasily occurred had the country Rwanda composed of more than a dozen tribes andthe Burundian equation will explode in a thrice when compared to what led tothe fall of Hotel Rwanda largely because the world has to deal with thedominant tribal factor in the Burundian Tutsi ruling class verses the minorityHutu, the direct opposite of what is the country Rwanda. In other words, it isbetter off with the Afrikan countries which in whose borders were grouped withmore tribes and ethnic groups as compared to those countries which werecarefully grouped with lesser tribes and or ethnic groups. The chance of thelater exploding into an ethnic wound is twice higher and than the former. Thatis where countries like Kenya hired the existing false security giving theKenyan child false hope that their country was on the right compass directionwhen on the prismatic compass, it has been pointing false north. Had thecountry Rwanda been grouped with more ethnic and tribal entities, the tribalexplosive train that detonated on Hotel Rwanda would have come at a much slowerpace and may be it would have been contained at larva stage. This is becausethe diverse difference that would have come with more tribal tones which weresuspicious of each other and thus so each other as bitter rivals will have notstricken a common assembly area because the warring tones would have neededmuch time to strike a collective ground. Look at the country Somalia? It is notvery different from the Rwandan equation. It is one tribe Somali, one language Somali,one culture Somali and which has been sold to the clan sword of wrath and hasslit the Somali womb open since the year 1991. Something has to be done beforewe loose Burundi. The Afrikan intellectual and re-creative intelligence willcertainly not require colonial master’s glasses to see this.

Has not the would be ideology for Afrika’s liberation been external to us,driven by foreign colonial history, colonial culture and experience, thencecolonial believes and way of running and formation of Afrikan idea? Havenot the colonial masters language which is alien to the Afrikan idea worked toensure an intellectual and spiritual revolution of the black continent foreverremain captive? Has courting of the colonial oppressor language derived fromcolonial foreign background and culture not ensured that the Afrikan ideaforever remains checked? Have Afrikan states not been boxed into the captivityof their respective colonial language, culture and traditions? Can someone denythe fact that what is killing the efforts of a west Afrikan integration is notthe act of the West Afrikan dream elites on whose shoulders lie the future ofthere countrymen as Moses was to Israelites, have been boxed into Frenchcaptivity and thus their only dream is to mould another small France in theirbackyard, live and talk French dress and behave French as English has done toEast Afrika, as Portuguese to former colonies and Belgium to Congo? Is myFrench speaking west Afrikan brother’s dream far away from spending a day in Parisin their lifetime as East Afrikan brothers to London? Can we deny to the factof God that our state coffer’s first priority upon swindling the Afrikan childis to not own assets in their former colonial powers, not mentioning theoutright act of seeking political asylum in their former colonial masters oncommitting human atrocities back home. Will i be labeled an extremist oftruth if i mentioned what is true to the fact of God that Afrika’s ruling classand their running dogs take their former colonies as a second home and the fewAfrika’s made rich will prefer living in colonial masters cities than backhome; send their children and kinsmen to learn and perfect the art of Afrika’sbig man by mastering colonial language, culture and traditions only to comeback home to maintain the status quo? Does this not explain why power is onlyfor rich men’s children and politically correct tribe in mother Afrika? Theworst sin you committed was to seduce your countrymen bore to the gloryof the tribal or ethnic cast and or grouping you come from as you yourselvesbow to your colonial masters, culture, traditions, language and even gods; andfor that the Afrikan child forever lives under his own shadow, under hiscreator’s sword of wrath.

As professor Molefi Asante put it, “eachrace has its batch, its exponent, its message, branded in its forehead by thegreat master’s hand which is its own peculiar keynote and its contribution tothe harmony of nations; communicated in their own peculiar tone and derivedtheir own peculiar instrument of control and thoughtand life being a journey that the wheels of civilization cannotdispense without, all but expressed in the things we do and act towards shapinga better tomorrow, with unity and separation of tones, civilization ismeasured. To what extend, sector and field have the live of my Afrikan brotherbeen liberalized? Is it her political and economical thought that is imbeddingthe intellectual and spiritual path towards fully liberalization or the formercomes first in natures perking order? In the efforts to redefine his talk; toretrace his lost footprints, the Afrikan child has encountered a rocky mountainof a problem. The problem of a ruling class system that perpetuates ethinicim,and uses tribalism as a key to maintain its dirty capitalistic exploitation.The black Afrika’s few “good men” who have learnt the art of using few men whocome out of colleges and the so called Afrika’s class of tribal elites andethnic thinkers taking advantage of their tendency to flock towards the big mansyndrome which is without question parallel to colonial practices they purportto have fought so hard against.(vide their actions and practices, one willwonder if indeed they were there and understood the pain and goals of the wars ofindependence) Those who have fought silently against the final liberationof the black continent vide their rhetoric tokenism that was forced into theirsalivating mouths and but which they know nothing about. This are the knownstumbling block that for a half a century have truly obscured a true liberationof Afrika by perpetuating ethnic differences, funning and sponsoring tribalanimosity and clanism as what happened in greater Somalia. These are the trueenemies of Afrika who are aiding and maintaining the exploitation of Afrika’sblack Jacobins. They have acrobatically learned the science of using ethnicdifferences on the continent to allow their power structures to flourish asthey exploit the poor workers of Afrika; because to them it is the sole key bywhich they maintain their control of the centre, to divide the ignorant massesand conquer them is the objective of the power structure. It is the rulingclass, Afrika’s ruling class, that small minority, few eating chiefs, ethnicleaches and their tribal bootlickers, the few avaricious demagogic hogs andrats who control and infest black governments. The ruling class and theirrunning dogs, their lackeys, their bootlickers, their Toms and their neo-imperialists, colonial masters in freedom fighter’s coat, the ethnicnationalists- they are all the running dogs of Afrika’s ruling class. These arethe ones who are guilty of financing and helping to maintain and aid tribal andAfrika’s infamous ethnic power structures by perpetuating their “nepotic” attitudesand using tribalism as a mean to divide the people. But it is really the smallminority ruling class, the air force one clan that is dominating, exploitingand oppressing the poor masses of black Afrika,- who in the fact of God are nottribalist and or ethnic thinkers. “Woe to you mother Afrika! For you are asthe last gleaning of the summer fruit, as the grape gleanings of the vintage,where no cluster is to eat. The good are perished out of Afrika and there isnone upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man,his brother with a net that they may do evil with both hands earnestly. TheAfrikan prince asketh, and the judge asks for a reward; and the great man heutters his mischievous desire: so they wrap it up. Among the best in Afrika, wehave found them sharp as a briar; among the most upright, we have found themsharper than a thorn-edge in the lives of their subjects. The day of thywatchman cometh and thy visitation draweth nigh, that shall be theirperplexity. Therefore, the Afrikan child looked up on the lord; he is waitingfor the God of his salvation; his God will here him; rejoice not againstme, oh mine enemy; though I be fallen, I shall yet arise; though i sit indarkness, the lord shall yet be light unto me. I will bear the indignation ofthe lord, because i have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause andexecutes judgment for me, and i shall behold his righteousness. Then mineenemies shall see it, and shame shall cover them which said unto me, where is thelord thy God, that regards thee; mine eyes shall behold them trodden down onthe mire of the streets. In that day that the wall of deliverance are to bebuild, in that day shall the decree of ethnicity, tribalism, nepotism, clanism;all children of the big man syndrome shall be far removed”.

Sold to sin is the Afrikan brother who reads a sign of betrayal in myextremism of truth. It is not me who do it but the one in me. One would nothave expected me to get the Afrikan Cat out of the kit bag that she has beencondemned for more than forty years. I confess to have gone against yourtraditions, practices and medieval believes but i fear you have suffered somuch my Afrikan brother. I value you so dearly and that was the reason why theone in me at the appointed hour used me to clear the mountains andvalleys that are those old medieval “beautiful” practices that have confusedthe Afrikan child to see wrong for right, night for day, God for counterfeit God, true church for Babylon mother of all harlots, lowertribal glory for higher national glory, ethnic and tribal glory for nationaland state glory, separation for meeting point and all those false tenets whichhave seen the Afrikan dream forever founded on running sand, thence theconspiracy in every inch of Afrikan live. Worry not about your eatingfathers, for your father is in heaven. Amos was an extremist of joy. “Letjoy flow down like a river. An Afrikan language will act as that essentialinstrument of society cohesion which is the only bridge any liberation cannotdispense without. Because the social cohesion will provide room for thefundamental elements of any liberation thence Afrika’s liberation which we havesought as an Afrikan family to no Vail will be at home and sown. Atmidnight celebrations of voodoo, the Afrikan cult, the slaves in the WestIndies for the love of their language and skin colour danced and sung, usuallythis favorite song:

“Eh! Bomba! Heh!Heh!

Canga bafiote!

Canga moune dei.e.!

Canga du ki la!

Canga li!

Interpreted us “ We shall destroy the whites and all that they poses; let usdie rather than fail to keep this vow” the colonialist knew this song and triedto stump it out, and the voodoo cult with which it was linked in vain. For over200 years, the slaves sung it in their meetings as the Jews in Babylon sung ofZion. The Afrikan child has silently started singing the national anthem ofAfrika.

“After this, Jesus knowing all things were now accomplished that thescripture might be fulfilled said, “I thirsty” now a vessel full of soar winewas sitting their; and they filled a sponge with soar wine, put it in hyssopand put it to his mouth. So when Jesus had received the soar wine, he said, “Itis finished!” and bowing”, the great controversy that stated in heaven whencherub son of the morning rebelled against the creator of the universe wasdecided. The Afrikan child thirst! The Afrikan child is hungry. The Afrikanchild feels shortchanged on lives’ ladder. He feels helpless. Down here inAfrika, there is a desire to meet but time is for separation. Yes, he ishungry. He thirsts! He is been fed by a sponge full of soar wine; a sponge fullof the scars inflicted by the big man syndrome, a sponge full of vague phonyideology and of ethnic cast and tribal glory. A sponge full of local poor man’sliquor, a sponge full of child soldiers drugs, commercial sex worker; that hehas been receiving from the running dogs of the big man clan of Afrika.He has been receiving it close to forty years and now cries out from the highestpeak of Mount Kilimanjaro saying, it is finished. But in this case he is notgoing to bow his head and give up the struggle because he looks upon the onewho did it for him up Calvary hill to break the black York NEO, and when hedoes, the final death nail into the world’s great conspiracy, the baby sisterof heaven’s great controversy will have been decided. It was only a proverb.Proverbial wisdom is wisdom of caution///.

TOGOD BE THE GLORY

This is the last page of my book "The Great Conspiracy, The Black gods of Afrika" which can be purchased on http://www.amazon.com/dp/1468181297, http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1468181297, http://www.amazon.de/dp/1468181297, http://www.amazon.fr/dp/1468181297, http://wwww.amazon.es/dp/1468181297, http://www,amazon.it/dp/1468181297 . kikiwabutembo@gmail.comThe Great Conspiracy: The black gods of Afrika (Volume 1)

This book is a must read for every person born of the Afrikan womb.

Documents Expose U.S. Role in Nkrumah Overthrow

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 16:20:00 +0000

Documents Expose U.S. Role in Nkrumah Overthrow By Paul Lee

Declassified National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency documents provide compelling, new evidence of United States government involvement in the 1966 overthrow of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah.

The coup d'etat, organized by dissident army officers, toppled the Nkrumah government on Feb. 24, 1966 and was promptly hailed by Western governments, including the U.S.

The documents appear in a collection of diplomatic and intelligence memos, telegrams, and reports on Africa in Foreign Relations of the United States, the government's ongoing official history of American foreign policy.

Prepared by the State Department's Office of the Historian, the latest volumes reflect the overt diplomacy and covert actions of President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration from 1964-68. Though published in November 1999, what they reveal about U.S. complicity in the Ghana coup was only recently noted.

Allegations of American involvement in the putsche arose almost immediately because of the well-known hostility of the U.S. to Nkrumah's socialist orientation and pan-African activism.

Nkrumah, himself, implicated the U.S. in his overthrow, and warned other African nations about what he saw as an emerging pattern.

"An all-out offensive is being waged against the progressive, independent states," he wrote in Dark Days in Ghana, his 1969 account of the Ghana coup. "All that has been needed was a small force of disciplined men to seize the key points of the capital city and to arrest the existing political leadership."

"It has been one of the tasks of the C.I.A. and other similar organisations," he noted, "to discover these potential quislings and traitors in our midst, and to encourage them, by bribery and the promise of political power, to destroy the constitutional government of their countries."

A Spook's Story

While charges of U.S. involvement are not new, support for them was lacking until 1978, when anecdotal evidence was provided from an unlikely source—a former CIA case officer, John Stockwell, who reported first-hand testimony in his memoir, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story.

"The inside story came to me," Stockwell wrote, "from an egotistical friend, who had been chief of the [CIA] station in Accra [Ghana] at the time." (Stockwell was stationed one country away in the Ivory Coast.)

Subsequent investigations by The New York Times and Covert Action Information Bulletin identified the station chief as Howard T. Banes, who operated undercover as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy.

This is how the ouster of Nkrumah was handled as Stockwell related. The Accra station was encouraged by headquarters to maintain contact with dissidents of the Ghanaian army for the purpose of gathering intelligence on their activities. It was given a generous budget, and maintained intimate contact with the plotters as a coup was hatched. So close was the station's involvement that it was able to coordinate the recovery of some classified Soviet military equipment by the United States as the coup took place.

According to Stockwell, Banes' sense of initiative knew no bounds. The station even proposed to headquarters through back channels that a squad be on hand at the moment of the coup to storm the [Communist] Chinese embassy, kill everyone inside, steal their secret records, and blow up the building to cover the facts.

Though the proposal was quashed, inside the CIA headquarters the Accra station was given full, if unofficial credit for the eventual coup, in which eight Soviet advisors were killed. None of this was adequately reflected in the agency's records, Stockwell wrote.

Confirmation and Revelation

While the newly-released documents, written by a National Security Council staffer and unnamed CIA officers, confirm the essential outlines set forth by Nkrumah and Stockwell, they also provide additional, and chilling, details about what the U.S. government knew about the plot, when, and what it was prepared to do and did do to assist it.

On March 11, 1965, almost a year before the coup, William P. Mahoney, the U.S. ambassador to Ghana, participated in a candid discussion in Washington, D.C., with CIA Director John A. McCone and the deputy chief of the CIA's Africa division, whose name has been withheld.

Significantly, the Africa division was part of the CIA's directorate of plans, or dirty tricks component, through which the government pursued its covert policies.

According to the record of their meeting (Document 251), topic one was the "Coup d'etat Plot, Ghana." While Mahoney was satisfied that popular opinion was running strongly against Nkrumah and the economy of the country was in a precarious state, he was not convinced that the coup d'etat, now being planned by Acting Police Commissioner Harlley and Generals Otu and Ankrah, would necessarily take place.

Nevertheless, he confidently—and accurately, as it turned out—predicted that one way or another Nkrumah would be out within a year. Revealing the depth of embassy knowledge of the plot, Mahoney referred to a recent report which mentioned that the top coup conspirators were scheduled to meet on 10 March at which time they would determine the timing of the coup.

However, he warned, because of a tendency to procrastinate, any specific date they set should be accepted with reservations. In a reversal of what some would assume were the traditional roles of an ambassador and the CIA director, McCone asked Mahoney who would most likely succeed Nkrumah in the event of a coup.

Mahoney again correctly forecast the future: Ambassador Mahoney stated that initially, at least, a military junta would take over.

Making it Happen

But Mahoney was not a prophet. Rather, he represented the commitment of the U.S. government, in coordination with other Western governments, to bring about Nkrumah's downfall.

Firstly, Mahoney recommended denying Ghana's forthcoming aid request in the interests of further weakening Nkrumah. He felt that there was little chance that either the Chinese Communists or the Soviets would in adequate measure come to Nkrumah's financial rescue and the British would continue to adopt a hard nose attitude toward providing further assistance to Ghana.

At the same time, it appears that Mahoney encouraged Nkrumah in the mistaken belief that both the U.S. and the U.K. would come to his financial rescue and proposed maintaining current U.S. aid levels and programs because they will endure and be remembered long after Nkrumah goes.

Secondly, Mahoney seems to have assumed the responsibility of increasing the pressure on Nkrumah and exploiting the probable results. This can be seen in his 50-minute meeting with Nkrumah three weeks later.

According to Mahoney's account of their April 2 discussion (Document 252), "at one point Nkrumah, who had been holding face in hands, looked up and I saw he was crying. With difficulty he said I could not understand the ordeal he had been through during last month. Recalling that there had been seven attempts on his life."

Mahoney did not attempt to discourage Nkrumah's fears, nor did he characterize them as unfounded in his report to his superiors.

"While Nkrumah apparently continues to have personal affection for me," he noted, "he seems as convinced as ever that the US is out to get him. From what he said about assassination attempts in March, it appears he still suspects US involvement."

Of course, the U.S. was out to get him. Moreover, Nkrumah was keenly aware of a recent African precedent that made the notion of a U.S.-organized or sanctioned assassination plot plausible—namely, the fate of the Congo and its first prime minister, his friend Patrice Lumumba.

Nkrumah believed that the destabilization of the Congolese government in 1960 and Lumumba's assassination in 1961 were the work of the "Invisible Government of the U.S.," as he wrote in Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, later in 1965.

When Lumumba's murder was announced, Nkrumah told students at the inauguration of an ideological institute that bore his name that this brutal murder should teach them the diabolical depths of degradation to which these twin-monsters of imperialism and colonialism can descend.

In his conclusion, Mahoney observed: "Nkrumah gave me the impression of being a badly frightened man. His emotional resources seem be running out. As pressures increase, we may expect more hysterical outbursts, many directed against US."

It was not necessary to add that he was helping to apply the pressure, nor that any hysterical outbursts by Nkrumah played into the West's projection of him as an unstable dictator, thus justifying his removal.

Smoking Gun

On May 27, 1965, Robert W. Komer, a National Security Council staffer, briefed his boss, McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson's special assistant for national security affairs, on the anti-Nkrumah campaign (Document 253).

Komer, who first joined the White House as a member of President Kennedy's NSC staff, had worked as a CIA analyst for 15 years. In 1967, Johnson tapped him to head his hearts-and-minds pacification program in Vietnam.

Komer's report establishes that the effort was not only interagency, sanctioned by the White House and supervised by the State Department and CIA, but also intergovernmental, being supported by America's Western allies.

"FYI," he advised, "we may have a pro-Western coup in Ghana soon. Certain key military and police figures have been planning one for some time, and Ghana's deteriorating economic condition may provide the spark."

"The plotters are keeping us briefed," he noted, "and the State Department thinks we're more on the inside than the British. While we're not directly involved (I'm told), we and other Western countries (including France) have been helping to set up the situation by ignoring Nkrumah's pleas for economic aid. All in all, it looks good."

Komer's reference to not being told if the U.S. was directly involved in the coup plot is revealing and quite likely a wry nod to his CIA past.

Among the most deeply ingrained aspects of intelligence tradecraft and culture is plausible deniability, the habit of mind and practice designed to insulate the U.S., and particularly the president, from responsibility for particularly sensitive covert operations.

Komer would have known that orders such as the overthrow of Nkrumah would have been communicated in a deliberately vague, opaque, allusive, and indirect fashion, as Thomas Powers noted in The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA.

It would be unreasonable to argue that the U.S. was not directly involved when it created or exacerbated the conditions that favored a coup, and did so for the express purpose of bringing one about.

Truth and Consequences

As it turned out, the coup did not occur for another nine months. After it did, Komer, now acting special assistant for national security affairs, wrote a congratulatory assessment to the President on March 12, 1966 (Document 260). His assessment of Nkrumah and his successors was telling.

"The coup in Ghana," he crowed, "is another example of a fortuitous windfall. Nkrumah was doing more to undermine our interests than any other black African. In reaction to his strongly pro-Communist leanings, the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-Western."

In this, Komer and Nkrumah were in agreement. "Where the more subtle methods of economic pressure and political subversion have failed to achieve the desired result," Nkrumah wrote from exile in Guinea three years later, "there has been resort to violence in order to promote a change of regime and prepare the way for the establishment of a puppet government."

Paul Lee is a historian, filmmaker, and freelance writer. He is Director of Best Efforts, Inc. (BEI), a professional research and consulting service that specializes in the recovery, preservation, and dissemination of global black history and culture. BEI offers "OurStory," a black history lecture series. You can reach him at besteffortsinc@yahoo.com.

Here are some CIA agent in Africa and abroad.

AFRIKA : AFRIKAN POWER IN AN EUROCENTRIC WORLD

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 19:55:00 +0000

AFRIKA : AFRIKAN POWER IN AN EUROCENTRIC WORLD

To restore Afrikan power, Africans must reassert themselves. We have riches of all kinds. We must control our raw materials. We must acquire technology to process these raw materials in Africa and export them as finished goods. We must break free from exploitative relationships with the West'.

Before our country was invaded by colonialists from Europe three African seers foretold of their coming and warned about certain things that our ancestors were to avoid in dealing with them. These seers were Ntsikana, Mmantsopa and King Somhlolo. This African King warned that there was 'the coming of strange people whose hair resembles bushy ends of an ox-tail. They had the colour of red maize. They spoke an unknown language. They knew not the customs of the African people.'

When I went to school my primary teacher taught me that in English, a thing that is the colour of milk or snow is white. Later I was told that the people whose colour King Somhlolo had described as 'the colour of red maize' were now called 'white people.' I have always puzzled about this because I think the description King Somhlolo gave is correct. Personally, I have never come across 'white people.' I do not know why these are called 'white people.' They are not the colour of milk or snow that my English teacher taught me is white.

Then I hear people talking about the 'West' and 'Western Civilisation.' I agree there might be Western Europe, even though I think this should be North because it is in North of Africa. It is not in West of Africa. I have also a problem when Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States of America, Tasmania, etc are regarded as part of this 'West' even though they are in the opposite direction of Western Europe. I suppose even The Falklands, which the Argentine government calls Malvinas, is part of this mysterious 'West.' Am I missing something here? Are some people playing games with Africa? Is this 'West' geographical, political or ideological?

Why are these people all calling themselves "White"? Are they really "White?" Why do they claim a colour that contradicts their external appearance? And why do many of them generally look down on a black colour in particular?

I see that in courts and at university graduation ceremonies these 'red maize' people wear black gowns. Their ministers of religion, too, wear black clothes. Their 'white' farmers prefer black soil to non-black soils. Of course, the black soil is naturally more fertile than non-black soils. I am told that the English Queen is driven in royal state cars that are black in colour. In fact, even at Heathrow Airport in London most taxicabs have a black colour.

But many of these self-appointed 'white' people seem to have a big problem with the black colour if it is in human beings. They have therefore caused much suffering to black people through slavery, colonialism and racism. This mysterious 'white' colour needs scientific research. It has created many problems in this world, particularly for people of other colours. Where are our Khoi people? Where are the San people? Where are the aborigines of Australia? Where are the indigenous people of America, Canada and New Zealand?

Why are black people of so-called 'New South Africa' who constitute 80 percent of the population allocated only 13 percent of resources in the land of their ancestors?

I am concerned that even the Saviour of the world Jesus Christ has been given a 'white' colour. This contradicts the Bible itself in Matthew 1:1-17, Luke 3:23-38. In the Book of Songs 1:5-6 King Solomon the son of David with Bathsheba, a black woman, proclaimed, 'I am Black and handsome.'

Jesus as a human being on this planet was not 'white.' The Jewish historian, Flavious Josephus who lived in the first century AD described Jesus as 'a man of plain looks, extremely learned and full of vigour with a dark skin.' Jesus was not 'white.'

There are no 'white' people in this world, if in English milk and snow truly represent white colour. In any case even the real white colour is not superior to other colours. It is only different from them.

In this introduction I have already inferred to Afrikan power in a Eurocentric world. Some of the questions that I must now answer are: Was there Afrikan power before colonialism or European slave trade? Is there such power now? If there is none, how must African people bring this power back? Can Afrikan power exist without the Africentric view of the world?

In my view, after these many centuries of European slavery, colonialism and racism that have poisoned the thinking of so many Africans, we cannot discuss Afrikan power in a Eurocentric world without looking at the long history of Africa and the utterances of those who think that Eurocentricity is the sole view of the world. They accept no other worldview.

Let me begin with what some proponents of Eurocentricity have said. Hugh Trevor-Roper, a professor of history at Oxford University wrote that 'Undergraduates, seduced by the changing breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps in future, there will be some African history to teach... at present there is none or very little. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness....and darkness is not a subject for history.'

The English professor added that 'Studying the history of Africa would be to amuse ourselves with unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in beautiful but irrelevant corners of the globe.' ('The Rise Of Christian Europe', Hugh Trevor-Roper page 1. Brace and World, 1965)

Corroborating this Eurocentric falsification of history, Philip Mitchell, a British colonial governor in Kenya boasted: 'The forty three-years I have spent in Africa - forty of them in public service - cover a large part of the history of Sub-Saharan Africa, for it can hardly be said to extend further back than about 1870.' ('Africa and the West in Historical Perspective', Philip Mitchell - AFRICA TODAY, Edited by G.C. Haines, Page 3. Green Press New York)

It has been dark times for Afrikan power in the Eurocentric world even from those who professed to honour God and serve Him. A Swiss missionary, Henri Junad, proclaimed: 'The Blacks...despite all that has been written on the fundamental axiom of the absolute equality of mankind, are an inferior race, made to serve....Christianity alone will make out of the Black a servant satisfied with his lot, for it alone will make a free and voluntary submission to the plans of the Divine Providence....Everyone is deeply concerned that the Negro should accept the position assigned to him by physical and intellectual faculties.

'Without the arms of the natives the gold mines of Johannesburg which have built up the prosperity of South Africa would cease to exist from one day to the next for it is the native arms which accomplish the entire manual labour in the extracting of gold. The white man's role is that of organiser, the master, under whose watch must work the million arms of the native population.' ('Introduction To African Civilisation', John G. Jackson. Page 311, Coro Publishing Group Edition 1977)

The Afrikan power was destroyed by the European gun, slave trade, colonialism and racism. Through the Berlin Treaty of 26 February 1885 African resources and labour were used to develop Europe and its satellites. To enthrone once again the Africentric view of the world, Africans must look at the history of Africa anew. Many scholars have ventilated on this position. We must assimilate their warnings and wisdom. A well-read scholar, Patrick Henry, has said: 'I know of no other way to foresee the future than the study of the past.' Our own most prominent Pan-Africanist scholar in our country, Dr. Muziwakhe Lembede, has written: 'One who wants to create a future must not forget the past.'

Why? A noted researcher on Africa, Amadou-Mahtar M'bow, who wrote the preface to the

'UNESCO General History of Africa' has drawn attention to the fact that: 'The history of Africa needs re-writing....Up until now it has been masked, faked, distorted by 'force of circumstances'; for example, through ignorance or self-interest. Crushed by centuries of oppression, Africa has seen generations of travellers, missionaries, colonial governors and scholars of all kinds give out Africa's image as one of nothing but poverty, barbarism...and chaos. This image has been projected in justification of both present and future....All evils that affect Africa today...are the result of countless forces that transmitted this faked history.'

Perhaps Africa's renowned political martyr, Patrice Lumumba, had in mind this subject when as he was about to be barbarously killed and his body burned in a petrol drum with the connivance of the forces of Eurocentricity; he said, 'History will one day have its say. It will not be a history written from the United Nations, Washington, Paris and Brussels...but the history taught in countries that have got rid themselves of colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history. It shall be full of glory and dignity.'

WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO INSTALL AFRIKAN POWER IN A EUROCENTRIC WORLD?

We, Africans, shall have to hunger for knowledge. We need to know who we were before the slave trade, colonialism and racism. What did our forebears achieve? The first and indisputable fact that we must know is that the first human civilisation on this planet was created by black people - Africans. The first renaissance in this world was African Renaissance. My book 'African Renaissance Saved Christianity' deals with this matter.

There are some European people and their cousins who claim that they came to Africa to 'civilise' Africans! How do you 'civilise' people through slavery, colonialism and racism? Some people called Africa the 'Dark Continent.' How come the 'Dark Continent' saved Moses' life under Pharaoh Seti I? This was through this Pharaoh's daughter Princess Thermuthis. It is Africa that educated Moses in the highest institutions of learning; made a leader out of him and gave him his wife Zipporah, a daughter of an African priest. Her name means beautiful.

How come that the 'Dark Continent' gave refuge to Jesus Christ when Herod conspired to kill him? How come the 'Dark Continent' gave Moslems asylum at the beginning of their religion when they were persecuted for their beliefs? How come that the fundamentals of the Christian faith were laid by African theologians such as Tertullian and Augustine? Augustine is reputed to have spoken Latin, the 'English' of those days 'in an African accent?'

There is archaeological evidence that Africans mined minerals such as gold, iron and copper 200,000 years before European colonial forces invaded and underdeveloped Africa. These mines existed in African countries such as Zimbabwe, Nubia, Kush, Egypt, Azania and Mozambique. The Azanian Civilisation itself stretched from East Africa to the country colonialists called 'South Africa' on the 20 September 1909. As late as 1626 AD, the 'Indian Ocean' was called the Azanian Sea. The Atlantic Ocean was known as the Ethiopian Sea.

Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer, philosopher, naturalist as well as a naval army commander of the Roman Empire mentioned the Azanian Sea as early as 60 AD. Right here in Azania in the 1930s, archaeological excavations revealed skeletal remains of what were called 'ancient Azanians' in Mapungubwe. These people were also referred to as the descendants of Kush.

A French missionary, the Rev. E. Casalis, has described King Moshoeshoe when he met him at his Thaba Bosiu Headquarters in 1833: 'Suddenly, a personage attired in the most fantastic fashion appeared....The King bent on me, a look at once majestic and benevolent...full of intelligence....I felt at once that I had to do with a superior man trained to think, to command others, above all himself....He wore on his right arm a bracelet of ivory...an emblem of power and copper rings on his wrists.'

Is this the image of an uncivilised African head of a pre-colonial state? On the contrary, it was this African King of the Basotho who accused the European invaders of his country of barbarism. Writing to Boshof, a colonial leader of the Boer Trekkers who had in 1858 invaded part of his country, which the invaders later called 'Orange Free State,' King Moshoeshoe said: 'No....The captains of your commandos are no Christians, for I shall never believe that Christianity consists in carrying away women and children into captivity; and in shooting down old and sick people.'

When provoked by colonial aggressors to war in 1838, King Dingane of the Zulus spared the lives of European missionaries. They were doing religious work in his country. These included the Rev. Francis Owen. This was despite the King's order, 'Bulalani abathakathi!' (Kill the wizards!)

Let us now look at the statements and findings of European archaeologists on pre-colonial Africa. The pyramids are found in various parts of Africa such as Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt. The Great Egyptian Pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu at Giza was built in 2560 BC. It was classified as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Writing about these pyramids, Dr Leander S Keyser, an American scholar proclaimed, 'Before the people of the earth are able to duplicate the Great Pyramids, they will have to rediscover the lost arts of hardening copper, overcoming gravitation, navigating the air, etc. Also perfect mathematics, measuring apparatus sufficiently correct at least to survey or measure the same objects twice with the same results.'

The American scholar added, 'Even with our boasted present-day enlightenment and progress, we must admit that some of the wonderful 'lost arts' of the ancient civilisation have never been recovered. We have not found the architectural secrets of erection of the Pyramids in Egypt.'

It was not a figment of his imagination when that highly learned French Egyptologist, CF Volney, told the Western world in 1787 that '...a race of black men who are today our slaves and object of our contempt is the same one to whom we owe our arts, sciences and even the very language.' Volney added, 'The Egyptians (Black people) were the first people to attain the physical and moral science necessary to civilise life.'

For his part, Sir EA Wallis Budge, who was keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities of the British Museum, has in his book, 'EGYPT', written: 'The prehistoric native Egypt both in old and new Stone Ages was African and there is every reason for saying the earliest inhabitants came from the South.'

There is substantial evidence for this, when it is remembered that the original name of Egypt was Mizraim or Kemet - meaning blackman's country. It is the Greeks who called Mizraim, Egypt, which in Greek also means the country of black people.

In his book, The Histories, The Father of European History, Herodotus, wrote in 450 BC that, 'The Egyptians, the Ethiopians, the Nubians and Colchians have thick lips, broad noses, woolly hair and they are burnt of skin (black).'

Affirming this view, Karl Lepsius, a German scholar who saw the evidence of this fact at the grave of Pharaoh Rameses III wrote that, 'Where we expected to see an Egyptian (being a 'white man'), we are presented with an authentic black.'

ON 'GREEK PHILOSOPHY'

Africa (ancient Egypt) civilised Greece and Greece civilised Western Europe. A number of Greek scholars were educated in ancient Egypt. When they returned to Greece the Greek government considered the philosophical ideas they learned from Africa a threat to the security of Greece. It persecuted them.

The first casualty of this persecution was Anaxagora. He was imprisoned and later exiled. The next victim was Socrates. The Greek government executed him. It exiled Plato and Aristotle. It got Pythagoras, the Greek student who studied mathematics in ancient Egypt for 21 years, expelled from Italy. It took many centuries for the Greeks to assimilate civilisation from Africa which later privileged Greece to become the 'cradle of Western Civilisation.' Yet, today teachings learnt by Greeks from Africa are called 'Greek Philosophy.'

In 1893, however, E. Reclus, author of The Earth And Its Inhabitants told the world that,'...Arithmetic, Architecture, Geometry, Astronomy, all the arts and nearly all today's industries and sciences were known by ancient Egyptians while the Greeks lived in caves. The pattern of our European thinking originated from Africa.'

Dr. Pixley Isaka ka Seme was from Azania. He was aware of the civilising role of Africa when on 5 April 1906, he delivered his speech, I Am an African, at Columbia University in America. He said, 'I would ask you not to compare Africa to Europe or any other continent. I make the request not from fear that comparison might bring humiliation upon Africa....Come with me to the ancient capital of Egypt in Thebes, the city of one hundred gates. The grandeur of its venerable ruins and the gigantic proportions of its architecture reduce, to insignificance, the boasted monuments of other nations. The pyramids of ancient Egypt are structures to which the world presents nothing comparable. The mighty monuments seem to look with disdain on every other work of human art and vie with nature itself. All the glory of Egypt belongs to Africa and her people.'

Yes, we are the descendants of builders of great kingdoms and creators of glorious civilisations based on UBUNTU - HUMANENESS. Our ancestors were genius inventors not for the destruction of the world, physically, morally and spiritually but for the development of man - the masterpiece of God's creation.

Africans built Memphis, the capital city of ancient Egypt, in 3100 BC. Greeks built Athens in 1200 BC. The Romans built Rome in 1000 BC. Africans invented writing. It was Hieroglyphics before 3000 BC. Hieratic alphabet shortly after this. Demotic writing was developed about 600 BC. The Kushite script was used in 300 B.C. Other African scripts were Merotic, Coptic, Amharic, Sabean, G'eez scripts, Nsibidi of Nigeria, Mende of Mali, etc.

To restore Afrikan power in a Eurocentric world, Africans must reassert themselves. We have riches of all kinds. We must control our raw materials. We must acquire technology to process these raw materials in Africa and export them as finished goods. We must exchange our raw material resources for high technology not for cash or so-called foreign investment or trade. We must banish dispossession and replace it with repossession. We must reassert ourselves. Those who claim to give us 'financial aid' get their riches in Africa. The Marikana Massacre of African miners in our country on 16 August 2012 who still dig our platinum for our dispossessors is a wakeup call.

We have to find our way forward. We have been trapped in the wilderness of Eurocentricity for far too long. We are not thinking as our ancestors did. We are not as brave as our ancestors. Our minds are colonised. We must decolonise our minds. Only decolonised minds can be an intellectual and spiritual engine to propel us to success and prosperity.

We must design a system of education that is tailored to the needs of our country. That education must equip our country with all kinds of skills and professions our country and continent need. No government will ever create jobs if it does not have a diversified quality education. It is skills that create jobs, not the other way round. A school system that produces students who cannot find public or self-employment is a failed education system. All institutions of learning that offer education that is irrelevant to the needs of our country or continent must be closed down. Our country and continent is full of minerals of all kinds and oil. How many geologists and men and women of science, technology,

agriculture and economics have we trained? Instead this mineral wealth is being exploited by neo-colonial forces and enriching their own countries, at the expense of Africa's underdevelopment and technological stagnation.

We must not allow our minds to be perpetually controlled and used against our own African interests. When the neo-colonial forces control your mind, they do not need to worry about your actions. They do not have to tell you not to stand here or there. You will find your place of servitude and inferiority yourself. They do not have to ask you to enter their houses through the back door. You will go through the back door without being told. If there is no back door, you will make one for yourself. That is how people with a slave mentality are trained and operate.

Until our minds are liberated and we accept our full human dignity and essential humanity, we shall do very little for ourselves, for our country, for our continent and for humanity. Our forefathers produced great and numerous civilisations and kingdoms whose artefacts are still filling the museums of Western Europe in captivity. There are one hundred thousand African artefacts from ancient Egypt alone in the Berlin Museum. Ghana's golden stool, the symbol of the Asante people, was ransacked from Africa. State coronation swords from Ethiopia were removed from Africa. Two thousand works of art in bronze, ivory, bead and wood were removed from the King of Benin. The Eurocentric forces want to hide the achievements of African civilisations from the descendants of African people, so that the falsehood of a so-called 'Dark Continent' can be perpetuated.

Afrikan power in a Eurocentric world is the key to our true mental decolonisation. Without the Africentric view of the world, Africans will remain mimics of cultural imperialism and victims of Eurocentric domination that serve non-African interests.

Martin Luther King's Speech Against the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King, Jr

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 15:15:00 +0000

Martin Luther King's Speech Against the Vietnam War.

One of the greatest speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Time to Break Silence," was delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, on April 4, 1967. It is a statement against war in principle, in the same sense in which King's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," published four years earlier, had been a statement against social injustice in principle. Yet like that extraordinary earlier appeal, "A Time to Break Silence" is also addressed to the evils of a particular time and place. It protests the command and deployment by Lyndon Johnson of almost unlimited violence against the people and the land of Vietnam for the declared purpose of protecting them from the menace of world communism.

King began by acknowledging his solidarity with the organizers of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam; and he pledged himself in full accord with their recent statement: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." In Vietnam, says King, "that time has come for us."

Yet to support concrete acts of nonviolent protest or non-cooperation remains a difficult choice.

"Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world."

The trouble is all the greater in a case like this, where evil is on both sides but where America's violence has greatly exceeded that of the enemy, since American resources for violence through the use of air power are so much greater. In such a situation, says King, "we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on."

This speech was King's public announcement of his opposition to the war. Moral protest, which said "The war is wrong," was still, as it would remain, very much a minority position. Even the tactical objection that said, "The war cannot be won," was still a marginal view, though now steadily gaining adherents. King knew that his uncompromising dissent would draw bitter attacks. Members of the black community would charge that by his new commitment he was diluting the single-minded pursuit of civil rights for which he was known to stand. "Some of us," he confesses, "who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak."

Here King arrives at the heart of his subject:

"Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: 'Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?' 'Why are you joining the voices of dissent?' 'Peace and civil rights don't mix,' they say. 'Aren't you hurting the cause of your people,' they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church – the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate – leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight."

His aim is to unite the protest against civil injustices with the protest against a policy of violence and domination abroad. You may (King seems to have thought) – you may, in some imagined logical universe, combine the domestic good and the foreign evil; but that is not how the minds and feelings of people in practice function. If it is logically possible to envisage a government that is wise and just to its own people while being cruel and oppressive toward others, still, in actuality this is not possible. It does not happen, because human nature is not formed for such double bookkeeping. People who fancy they can act the two parts at once are imagining a form of conduct beyond their psychological means.

King turns now to a practical observation. War is an enemy to the poor in America. By a terrible compensation we are sending blacks to fight in Vietnam when we cannot find jobs or justice for them at home. How can he preach non-violence in America while this process goes forward?

"For those who ask the question, 'Aren't you a civil rights leader?' and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: 'To save the soul of America.' We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

"O, yes, I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath –

America will be!

"Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land."

Accordingly, he argues, it is fitting for him to dedicate part of his energy in the coming months to the protest against the war.

Some people thought his recent statements in criticism of American foreign policy were an abuse of the impartial honor of his Nobel Prize for Peace. A man so distinguished, they said, ought not to join a protest movement that might be seen as fractious or merely parochial. King replies now by saying that

"the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission – a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men – for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?"

And he goes on to explain his motives in explicitly Christian terms:

"Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

"This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

"And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries."

Thus in a way exceptional for an American, and for any social critic or prophet, King moved beyond a protest within his country to a work of conscience he knew must cross all national boundaries.

As Jesus Christ spoke from a care for what was done to "the least of these," King looks to a subject neglected by Americans: the history of suffering by the Vietnamese people.

"They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945, after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long."

In a short summary, he recounts the history of the Vietnamese battle for independence from 1945 to 1965. What astonishes King about America's conduct after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, is that, under cover of a client state with a sham democracy, we chose to make ourselves the successors of the departing French colonists:

"Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

"So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

"What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?"

Martin Luther King's striking comparison of the Americans in Vietnam to the Germans in Europe was "extreme" by the standards of American opinion in 1967; as it would be extreme in our own time to suggest that a similar comparison is warranted by the use of phosphorous bombs in the second siege of Fallujah and of psychotropic drugs on terrorist suspects in Guantanamo. To King, the truth of a perception mattered more than its happy or disagreeable effect on the listener. This comparison did not, in fact, constitute for him a special provocation. He presents it as matter of fact: a truth about the way power and technology, once possessed, are inevitably used in the modern age. The lights of perverted science assist the experiments and protract the dominance of a military power that recognizes no restraint.

But King also here implies a subtler thought – implies it so clearly that it need not be spoken. Unlimited power will do everything it can against those it has once dehumanized as a "total" enemy (an enemy that is a beast and also a thing). The brutalization of mind always takes place before the atrocity in which it proves itself. Nor is the capacity for such acts the attribute of a single nation or race. The same part of the mind that invented Zyklon B invented napalm. The same human nature that wanted to use the poison gas as soon as it saw the ingenuity of the thing also wanted to use the lethal burning jelly.

Destruction has its own momentum and its own fascination. Things built over ages can be made to vanish in an instant under its annihilating stroke. That is what happened to the ancient culture, the farms, and the forests of Vietnam under the unleashed assault of American air power – which, by the end of the war, would subject a country the size of Italy to more than three times the tonnage of bombs dropped in all of the Second World War.

"We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

"Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call 'fortified hamlets.' The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers."

Thus far, the condemnation has been general, but King now moves to speak of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam – both, in 1967, still considered off limits in public discussion, even though it was generally known that a negotiated settlement without their participation would be meaningless. Whatever our actions might say, American intentions, as all Americans agreed, were unselfish; and, though Vietnam might be the home of the Vietnamese, millions of them had been grossly deceived and misled. As for the North Vietnamese and the NLF, no good would ever come from them. Martin Luther King offered a radical challenge to each of these premises; yet the method (King believed) for showing America the false conceit of its innocence was to acknowledge the harm done to Vietnam alongside a catastrophe nearer to home. He speaks of what this war is doing to the American soldiers who have to fight it:

"I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

"Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours."

King ends this penultimate section by quoting a Buddhist leader who had once admired the United States but who, from his experience of the war, concluded that America could never again be a revolutionary country for freedom. Its fate after Vietnam would be chiefly to be known and feared for its relentless use of military power.

Having turned from inquest to prophecy, the speech concludes with five specific proposals. End the bombing; commit the U.S. to a unilateral cease-fire; curtail the build-up of American troops in Laos and Thailand; recognize the NLF as a legitimate party in negotiations; and set a date for withdrawal. It took enormous courage, a now almost unimaginable independence, for a leader so close to established opinion in America to say these things in April 1967. One year ahead lay the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson from the presidential campaign of 1968, after a primary in New Hampshire in which the insurgent candidate, Eugene McCarthy, said far milder things about the Vietnam war than King in "A Time to Break Silence."

How would our history, and Vietnam's, have changed had Martin Luther King's advice been followed in 1967? Many who are dead would have lived. An environment and a way of a life would have been spared a depth of destruction whose effects have yet to be fully measured. And the truth of the warning that followed his proposals would not have become a truth of history: that America (as King put it) was placing itself on the wrong side of the revolution for freedom throughout the world. He summoned the words of John F. Kennedy: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." The truth of that axiom seems hardly to have diminished forty years later. With one notable difference: a substantial portion of American policy makers have now inherited the Jacobin and Soviet ambition to be the fomenters of violent revolution abroad.

We would know the great Riverside Church oration of April 1967 as the work only of an inspired reformer and protest leader – not of the moral leader that Martin Luther King always also was – had it closed with this comment regarding the ultimate cost of America's policy. Yet the speech looks beyond the Vietnam war and asks us to consider the wrong of war itself. An end to wars is a cause to which at least all Christians are called to dedicate themselves. For war is always the instrument of the powerful. It sharpens the sting of inequality, and by destruction it steals from the poor the lives they have built. As Christians, therefore,

"we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

"A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

The doctrine is Christian; and yet King in this speech made sure not to claim that it was exclusively Christian:

Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

Will Americans (King wondered) live according the morality of the Good Samaritan? Or will we continue on the path we have taken, and live by the ethics of the Caesars?

"There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: 'The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.'

"We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."

With that final evocation of crisis – adding some favorite verses from James Russell Lowell about the choices both men and countries face – King left his audience to their thoughts. One year, to the day, after he delivered this speech, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Ask an American about the anti-war speech in Riverside Church – as surprising in its range of thoughts and as closely argued as anything ever written or spoken by Martin Luther King – and you are likely to find only the vaguest of recognitions. Few know more than that there was such a speech. In fact, "A Time to Break Silence" marked a crossroads in the life of Martin Luther King. President Johnson never forgave him for breaking ranks; pro-war liberal Democrats afterward often dissociated themselves from his actions; and a large part of the civil rights movement deplored his stance as a violation of an unspoken contract. Civil rights, they thought, was about black Americans, and the cause of black Americans was civil rights. The violence of the cities had nothing to do with the violence of the war.

Even some advisers close to King, as Taylor Branch recounts in At Canaan's Edge, believed that the speech was impolitic – "too advanced," "not so balanced" as it should have been; while the political counselor of President Johnson, John P. Roche, wrote a confidential memorandum saying that King had "thrown in his lot with the commies." As for the press, the New York Times judged that King's protest against the war was "wasteful and self-defeating" and likely to be "disastrous for both causes." The Washington Post went further. It predicted that many who had once listened to King with respect "would never again accord him the same confidence"; and it concluded: "He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people." Recall that, in his speech, King said that concern for black Americans had led him to concern for America as a whole, and for the people of the world. The Post, by its gesture of severance, was returning the black minister to "his people" with the considered judgment that he was no longer of much use even to them.

Martin Luther King was disturbed, but cannot have been surprised, by the tenor of these responses; and in a "Face to Face" television interview on July 28, when asked directly about the supposed contradiction between his efforts on behalf of civil rights and in the anti-war movement, he gave his reply:

"I have worked too long now, and too hard to get rid of segregation in public accommodations to turn back to the point of segregating my moral concern. Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And wherever I see injustice, I'm going to take a stand against it whether it's in Mississippi or in Vietnam."

He had said something like these words before, but never before so piercingly

Moral courage is rare. Still rarer is the courage to oppose a president who has helped your cause and the consensus of a party that has supported your cause. But in April 1967, King had reached a point where he knew that "silence is betrayal," and he knew that he had to act. He saw that conformity to the dogma of anti-communism had muffled free discussion in the United States; that the excuse of ideology had blinded Americans of all colors to the infectiousness of the violence we practiced. King's greatness, at that moment, did not take the form of simple civic courage, the performing of a public duty you have come to expect of yourself. Rather, his was that "more lonely courage" William James once spoke of – courage which shows itself in leaving a secure post and taking up one more exposed, because the time and place require your presence. by David Bromwich

The White Anti-Racist Is an Oxymoron:An Open Letter to White Anti-Racists

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 20:10:00 +0000

The White Anti-Racist Is an Oxymoron: An Open Letter to “White Anti-Racists”By Tamara K. Nopper.

"HE continues to exploit, degrade, and oppress Afrikans...at

every corner of the globe. To recognize these facts does not make you

anti-HE OR SHE or racist. It merely means that you have enough

intelligence to know your enemy. As a note of caution,I , do not allow

MYSELF to be drawn into a time-consuming,

useless, debate over whether or not HE is racist. His

record more than ever speaks for itself.

I received an annoying e-mail about white people and their struggle to do anti-racist work. I keep reading and hearing white people talk about their struggle to do anti-racist organizing, and frankly it gets on my nerves. So I am writing this open letter to white people who engage in any activist work that involves or affects non-whites. Given that the US social structure is founded on white supremacy, and that there is a global order in which white supremacy and European domination are at large, I would challenge any white person to figure out what movement or action they can get involved in that will not involve or affect non-white people.

That said, I want to begin with what has become a realization for me through the help of different politically conscious friends. There is NO SUCH THING AS A WHITE ANTI-RACIST. The term itself, "white anti- racist" is an oxymoron. In the following, I will explain why. Then, I will begin to detail how this impacts non-white people in organizing work specifically, along with how it affects non-white people generally.

First, one must realize that whiteness is a structure of domination. As such, there is nothing redeemable or reformable about whiteness. Intellectuals, scholars and activists, especially those who are non- white, have drawn our attention to this for years. For example, people such as Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and many, many others who are perhaps less famous, have articulated the relationship between whiteness and domination.

Further, people such as Douglass and DuBois began to outline how whiteness is a social and political construct that emphasizes the domination, authority, and perceived humanity of those who are racialized as white. They, along with many other non-white writers and orators, have pointed to the fact that it was the bodies who were able to be racialized as "white" that were able to be viewed as rational, authoritative, and deserving. Further, and believe me, this is no small thing, white people are viewed as human. What this means is that when white people suffer, as some who are poor/female/queer, they nevertheless are able to have some measure of sympathy for their plight simply because they are white and their marginalization is considered an emergency, crisis or an issue to be concerned about.

Furthermore, even when white people have been oppressed by various dimensions of classism, homophobia and heterosexism, they have been able to opt for what DuBois, in his monograph "Black Reconstruction" brilliantly called "the psychological wage of whiteness." That is, whites that are marginalized could find comfort, even if psychological, in the fact that they were not non-white. They could revel in the fact that they could be taken as white in opposition to non-white groups. The desire for this wage of whiteness was also what drove many white people, albeit marginalized, to engage in organized violence against non-whites.

Of course, legal cases such as the Dred Scott Decision along with many different naturalization cases involving Asian individuals, has helped to encode a state-sanctioned definition of whiteness. But there are other ways in which white people can be racialized as white by the state. They are not stopped while driving as much as non-white people. Their homes and businesses are not raided and searched as much by police officers, INS or License and Inspections (L&I). White people's bodies are not tracked and locked up in prisons, detention centers, juvenile systems, detention halls in classrooms, "special education" classes, etc. White people's bodies are not generally the site of fear, repulsion, violent desire, or hatred.

Now some might point out to me that white people are followed, tracked and harassed by individuals and state agents such as the police. This is true. Some white women get sexually harassed and experience state-sanctioned discrimination. Queer whites are the subject of homophobia, whether by individuals or by the state through laws and the police. Some queer whites are harassed by cops. Activist whites are stopped by police. White people who play rap music and wear gear are stopped by cops. Poor whites can be criminalized, especially by the state around welfare issues. What I want to point out is that, while I do not condone police violence and harassment, there is a way in which white people will not be viewed as inherently criminal or suspect unless they are perceived as doing something that breaks particular norms.

Conversely, other racial groups, particularly Blacks and Native Americans, are considered inherently criminal no matter what they do, what their sexual identity is or what they wear. Further, it has always struck me as interesting that there are white people who will attempt to wear what signifies "Blackness," whether it is dreadlocks (which, in my opinion, should be cut off from every white person's head), "gear," or Black masks at rallies. There is a sick way in which white people want to emulate that which is considered "badass" about a certain existential position of Blackness at the same time they do not want the burden of living as a non-white person. Further, it really strikes me as fucked up the way in which white people will go to rallies and taunt the police with Black masks in order to bring on police pressure. What does it mean when Blackness is strategically used by whites to bring on police violence? Now I know that somewhere there is a dreadlocked, smelly white anarchist who is reading this message and who is angry with me for not understanding the logic of the Black masks and its roots in anarchism. But I would challenge these people to consider how they are reproducing a violence towards Blackness in their attempts to taunt and challenge the police in their efforts.

Now back to my point that white anti-racism is an oxymoron. Whiteness is a social and political construct rooted in white supremacy. White supremacy is a structure and system of beliefs rooted in European and US imperialism in which certain racialized bodies (non-white) are selected for premature negation whether through cultural, physical, psychological genocide, containment or other forms of social death. White supremacy is at the heart of the US social system and civil society. In short, white supremacy is not just a series of practices or privilege, but a larger social structure and system of domination that overly-values and rewards those who are racialized as white. The rest of us are constructed as undeserving to be considered human, although there is significant variation within non-white populations of how our bodies are encoded, treated and (de)valued.

Now, for one to claim whiteness, one also is invested in white supremacy. Whiteness itself is a political term that emerged among European white ethnics in the US. These European ethnics, many of them reviled, chose to cast their lot with whiteness rather than that with those who had been determined as non-white. In short, anyone who claims to be white, even a white anti-racist, is identifying with a history of European imperialism and racism transported and further developed into the US.

However, this does not mean that white people who go around saying dumb things such as "I am not white! I am a human being!" or, "I left whiteness and joined the human race," or my favorite, "I hate white people! They're stupid" are not structurally white. Remember, whiteness is a structure of domination embedded in our social relations, institutions, discourses, and practices. Don't tell me you're not white but then when we go out in the street and the police don't bother you or people don't ask you if you're a prostitute, or if people don't follow you and touch you at will, act like that does not make a difference in our lives. Basically, you can't talk, or merely "unlearn" whiteness, as all of these annoying trainings for white people to "unlearn" racism will have you think.

Rather, white people need to be willing to have their very social position, their very relationship of domination, their very authority, their very being...let go, perhaps even destroyed. I know this might sound scary, but that is really not my concern. I am not interested in making white people, even those so-called good-hearted anti-racist whites, comfortable about their position in struggles that shape my life in ways that it will never shape theirs. I recently finished the biography of John Brown by DuBois. The biography was less of a biography and more of an interpretation by DuBois about the now-legendary white abolitionist. Now while John Brown's practice was problematic in many ways--he still had to be in control and he had fucked-up views that Blacks were still enslaved because they were too "servile" (a white supremacist sentiment)--what I took from Brown's life was that he realized that moral persuasion alone would not solve racial problems. That is, whites cannot talk or just think through whiteness and structures of white supremacy. They must be committed to either picking up arms for other people (and only firing when the people tell them so), dying for other people, or just getting out of the way. In short, they must be willing to do what the people most affected and marginalized by a situation tell them to do.

Now I am sure that right now there are some white people saying that other people cannot understand what is going on, that they do not have the critical analysis to figure stuff out, or that non-white people have fucked up ideas. This is just white supremacist bullshit because it is rooted in the idea that non-white people have not interpreted their experiences and cannot run things themselves. It also assumes that there are not internal conversations within communities--which I do not think white people need to be privy to or participate in--in which people struggle out their own visions for society and how to go about achieving them. In short, this perspective by whites that non-white people cannot be in control of our own destinies is rooted in a paternally-racist approach to non-white people.

Further, it is also rooted in the idea that white people are not racist or do not benefit from racism. Rather, white people at meetings will often discuss how they feel "silenced" by non-whites, or that they are being "put in their place." Let me make one thing clear: it is impossible for a non-white person to put a white person in her place. This is not to say that non-white people cannot have a sexist or homophobic attitude towards a white person. But to say, or even hint at that as a "WHITE" person someone is being put in their place--whoever says this just needs to shut the fuck up because that is some bull. It is impossible for whiteness to be put in one's place, because that is a part of whiteness, the ability to take up space and feel a prerogative to do so.

Further, the idea that white people are being put into their place relies on the neo-conservative view of reverse racism that has characterized the backlash against non-whites, especially Blacks, in the post-civil rights era. So when you say these types of things you are actually helping to reproduce a neo-conservative racial rhetoric which relies on the myth of the "threatened" and "displaced" white person.

Additionally, white activism, especially white anti-racism, is predicated on an economy of gratitude. We are supposed to be grateful that a white person is willing to work with non-white people. We are supposed to be grateful that you actually want to work with us and that you give us your resources. I would like to know why you have those resources and others do not? And don't assume that just because I have to ask you for resources that it does not hurt me, pain me even. Don't assume that when you come into the space, that doesn't bother me. Don't assume that when you talk first, talk the most, and talk the most often, that this doesn't hurt me. Don't assume that when I see you get the attention and accolades and the book deals and the speaking engagements that this does not hurt me (because you profit off of pain). And don't assume that when I see how grateful non-white people are to you for being there, for being a "good white" person that this doesn't hurt me. And don't assume that when I get chastised by non-white people because I think your presence is unnecessary that it does not hurt me. Because all of these things remind me of how powerless non-white people are (albeit differently) in relation to white people. All of these gestures that you do reminds me of how grateful I am supposed to be towards you because you actually (or supposedly) care about what is happening to me. I am a bit resentful of economies of gratitude.

Further, this structure of white supremacy known as white anti-racism also impacts the larger social world because it still makes white people the most valued people. Non-white people are forced to feel dependent and grateful to white people who will actually interact with us. We are made to feel that we are inferior, incapable, that we really do need white people. And the sad thing is, that given all of the resources that whiteness has and that white people get and control, there is an element of material truth in all of this, I am afraid. But white people need to think of how their activism reproduces the actual structure of white supremacy some--not all whites activists--profess to be about. This structure of white supremacy is not just in an activist space, it actually touches upon and impinges on the lives of non-white people who may not be activists (in your sense) or who do not interact with you in activist worlds.

But consider what your presence means in a community that you decide to set up your community garden in, or your bookstore in, or your meeting space in, or have your march in. What does it mean when you decide that you want to be "with" the oppressed and you end up displacing them? Just because you walk around with your dreadlocks, or decide that you will not wear expensive clothes does not mean that your whiteness does not displace people in the spaces you decide to put yourself in. How do you help to bring more forms of authority and control in a neighborhood, whether through increased rent and housing costs, more policing, or just the ways in which your white bodies can make people feel, as a brilliant friend of mine once asked, "squatters in somebody else's project"?

So what does this mean for the future of white anti-racists? This might mean to first, figure out ways in which whiteness needs to die as a social structure and as an identity in which you organize your anti-racist work. What this looks like in practice may not be so clear but I will attempt to give some suggestions here. First, don't call us, we'll call you. If we need your resources, we will contact you. But don't show up, flaunt your power in our faces and then get angry when we resent the fact that you have so many resources we don't and that we are not grateful for this arrangement. And don't get mad because you can't make decisions in the process. Why do you need to? Secondly, stop speaking for us. We can talk for ourselves. Third, stop trying to point out internal contradictions in our communities, we know what they are, we are struggling around them, and I really do not know how white people can be helpful to non- whites to clear these up. Fourth, don't ever say some shit to me about how you feel silenced, marginalized, discriminated against, or put in your place. Period. Finally, start thinking of what it would mean, in terms of actual structured social arrangements, for whiteness and white identity--even the white antiracist kind (because there really is no redeemable or reformed white identity)--to be destroyed.

In conclusion, I want to say to anyone who thinks that this is too academic or abstract, I write as a non-white person, meaning that from my body, my person, I experience white supremacy. I also draw my understanding of white supremacy from non-white people, many engaged in various struggles of activism, but most importantly just to speak out and stay alive. They did not get accolades from many for speaking out but instead experienced constant threats on their lives for just existing and doing the work that they did. Moreover, I want to know when a discussion of whiteness, white supremacy and domination became seen as abstract and not rooted in the everyday concrete reality that we experience?

Africa is still being colonized,every Sunday.Criminals Posing as Men of God

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:50:00 +0000

Africa is being colonized and christianized all over again. The colonizers this time are Americans not Europeans and the brand of belief they are bringing to Africa is Evangelical Christianity, a fundamentalist version of the protestant faith that many Pentecostalists, Baptists and others have allied themselves with." Leo Igwe, Secretary of IHEU Member Organisation the Nigerian Humanist Movement writes about this new danger that is threatening Africa.

Born-Again Africa

The BBC article poignantly captures the ongoing religious devastation, exploitation, wanton destruction, and cultural rape of Africa by Evangelical Christianity, also known as Pentecostalism. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Pentecostalism is spreading like a wild fire leaving death, rot, darkness and destruction in its wake.

Thousands of Pentecostal churches are mushrooming in cities and rural areas across the continent. In fact, in Africa, there are more churches and mosques than schools, industries and research centres. According to the Focus on Africa magazine, Evangelical Christianity has more that 125 million devotees in Africa - 19 percent of the continent's population - up from 17 million people who described themselves as 'born-again Christians' in 1970.

Several factors are responsible for the rapid spread and proliferation of Pentecostal infamy in Africa. First is the growing disenchantment with the mainstream (orthodox) Christian sects - Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran etc. These churches place a lot of emphasis on rules, hierarchy, and doctrines, while the Evangelical groups are said to be more 'liberal' and personal.

The Pentecostal churches emphasize the infallibility of the Bible as a literal historical record that should be accepted hook line and sinker. They insist on salvation for everybody through faith in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. They look forward to the second coming of Jesus and the rapture. Evangelical groups have a mode of worship that is characterized by spiritual abandonment as expressed in speaking in tongues, dancing, singing and clapping of hands and other unorthodox forms of devotion.

Primitive Business

The second reason why Pentecostal churches are making waves in Africa is their emphasis on miracles and faith healing. Africans are suckers for magic, miracles and paranormal claims. Evangelical churches now capitalize on that. They promise divine healing and instant solutions to all problems - poverty, hunger, failure, diseases, accidents etc. Pentecostal pastors claim they can make the deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk and the barren give birth to children. They tell us they can raise the dead, make the poor rich and the unemployed to get jobs. Africans are therefore trooping to Pentecostal churches in their millions mainly in search of their miracles.

Another reason for the apparent boom in Pentecostal Christianity in the black continent is American support and influence. The Pentecostal movement originated in America. It arose in the early part of the 20th century in reaction to modernism. And with the growing decline in religious belief in America and the entire western world, evangelists are looking to Africa for converts, for followers and disciples. Most Pentecostal churches in Africa therefore have American connections. And they receive millions of dollars in aid from their American counterparts who want to 'bring Africans to Christ'. Luis Bush, a cousin of the American President George Bush and one of the leading evangelists in the US, supports missionary work in more that 30 African countries. Other American evangelists. Benny Hinn, Todd Bentley, Oral Roberts and the German evangelist Reinhard Bonke, sponsor miracle crusades across the continent.

Pentecostalism has therefore become a thriving business in Africa. In fact it has become the shortest route to wealth and affluence for the continent's teeming population of unemployed youths. Local pastors employ all sorts of means, tricks and techniques to exhort money from gullible folks (as well as foreign friends). They use this money to build magnificent churches, erect costly apartments, and buy luxurious cars and aircrafts. They live ostentatiously while their church members live and languish in poverty, misery and squalor.

Criminals Posing as Men of God

The most stinking and revolting aspect of the evangelical work in Africa is faith-healing. Most Evangelical pastors in Africa are now faith healers. They claim to have powers to cure all diseases and solve all problems. Recently, Gilbert Deya, a self acclaimed archbishop from Kenya, got himself into trouble. He said he could make infertile black couples give birth to miracle babies. But police investigations revealed child theft and baby trafficking. Some years ago, a Nigerian pastor Temitope Joshua - of the Synagogue of All Nations - announced to the world that he could cure HIV/AIDS. But his claims were later discovered to be all fake and forgery.

In 2001, the German evangelist, Renhard Bonnke, was reported to have raised somebody from the dead. There have been a lot of such indiscriminate claims of miracles and divine healing by Nigeria's televangelists and doomsday preachers - Chris Oyakhilome, Enoch Adeboye, David Oyedepo, Helen Ukpabio, and Matthew Ashimolowo etc. These faith-healers use the money extorted from miracle seekers to mount billboards and sponsor radio and television programmes advertising their miracles. Last year, the Broadcasting commission in Nigeria had to ban the transmission of miracles on national television. Faith healing is the greatest threat to scientific medicine and health care delivery in Africa.

Claims of divine cure and healing cannot be reconciled with the dire health situation in Africa. Africa has the highest infant mortality rate in the world. And millions out there are still dying of preventable diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. According to the United Nations, 6000 African children die - and 11,000 get infected with HIV/AIDS every day. And if indeed there are people with supernatural powers to heal the sick, raise the dead and cure all ailments, why are Africans suffering and dying; why are human beings suffering and dying?

Evangelism - A Dangerous Expansion

Levi Fragell

Can it harm anyone to speak in tongues, become temporarily spasmic, believe in miracles and pay a relatively large part of one's income to the Church - a part that after all is less than what others spend in restaurants and casinos? What about all those who find a warm and including fellowship in the congregation? These questions are not always easy to answer. Sometimes anxious parents call me and ask for advice about their teenage children who have been captured by a charismatic group. I do not always alarm them. Individually it may be better to be a member of a religious sect than a violent gang. In my childhood church I have met some of the warmest, most generous and most honest people I have ever known.

But the Pentecostal or Charismatic Church is the only legally and politically accepted movement in the world that is fully and completely based upon systematic fraud, deception and cheating. Historically you will find fraud and cheating in most Church traditions, connected to prophesies, claimed revelations and miracles, financial transactions etc. But where else in the world today would you find and accept television programmes where hundreds of sick people are declared miraculously healed from their illnesses? Where else would it be accepted that the leader tell his audience that God has spoken directly to him and informed him that 5 persons in the assembly, three men and two women, will be cured of their diabetes right now? Where else would a group leader avoid criminal investigation after insisting that God has told him that 30 persons in the group are going to pay 10,000 dollars each to construct a new building for the assembly? The most successful Charismatic churches have been established and developed by such methods. The American ministries of this kind are well known, and sometimes even exposed - with regrettably little effect. In Europe we have sometimes looked upon these phenomena as "typically American", connected to a mass media culture and a kind of capitalistic liberalism that is foreign to a more regulated social democratic West European tradition. That is a short-sighted simplification. We should have learnt that what is today 'typically American' will some day become 'typically global'.

All the successful Charismatic leaders I know in Scandinavia today have learnt their ways and techniques directly from Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Hagin, etc., etc. The global outreach from Azusa street in Los Angeles goes all the way to Seoul in South Korea, where David Yonggi Cho has built the largest Chrtistian congregation in the world with close to 800,000 born-again members, who every week pay at least 10 % of their income to the Church. Yonggi Cho does nothing to hide the reason for his success. In his book "The Fourth Dimension" he writes that every Sunday he tells his audience that God has revealed to him how many are going to be healed that particular day from specific illnesses.

How long will the Charismatic expansion proceed and develop all over the world, before psychologists, sociologists, liberal writers and politicians understand that something fundamentally unhealthy is going on, that the religion called Christianity is changing its character - not necessarily away from the original Biblical practises - but very far from today's schoolbook versions of modern and humanised religion.

Very few studies of this change of streams exist. One of them is David Martin's book Tongues of Fire, where he shows that the Pentecostal or Charismatic Church very soon will be the largest Christian church in Latin America. Already 80 % of the Protestants in Chile are Pentecostals, and even if the Catholic church still is leading in most of the Latin American countries, the Pentecostals grow with the highest rates. The Pentecostal cathedral in Santiago has 18.000 seats and The Temple of Brasil para Christo takes even more, writes David Martin.

Prometheus Books is one of the very few publishing companies taking interest in this situation. Several titles like Skipp Porteous's autobiography Jesus Doesn't Live Here Anymore, James Randi's Faithhealers, and books about Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Bakker and other Charismatics have been published. The most comprehensive of these books is The Hallelujah Revolution by the British journalist Ian Cotton where he alerts us to the fact that this movement stretches from South America to Europe, from Canada to mainland China: in Henan province of China, for instance, a million converts were reported in 1994.

The highly esteemed statistical surveys published by David Barrett now show beyond doubt that the Pentecostal/Charismatic churches are the world's largest protestant movement, with 500 million followers in 1997. While the Baptists and the Methodists till the middle of the 20th century where the flagships of the Protestants, these churches are now left behind by the Pentecostals - or they have changed their own character and joined the more successful Brethern in the Lord. Those of us who come from cultures like for instance the Scandinavian or English societies, may have lived in the illusion that the Lutheran or Anglican churches are the big ones, and we have to realize that these are minorities compared with the hallelujah-shouting half billion Charismatics.

We are now facing the fact that the Pentecostals within a period of time also may outnumber the Catholic church, which today is the world's largest Christian denomination, with 1 billion members. Barrett's 1997 prognosis says that this number will increase to 1.3 billion in 2025, while the Pentecostals in the same time span will more than double their number from 500 million to 1.1 billion - an increase that with a similar speed will make the Catholic church the world's number two church before the year 2030. Even if this prognosis fails, we have to add to the picture that the Pentecostals are active and practising believers. Their churches do not have the same kind of formal and passive membership as the old churches haves.

Leo Igwe

The church squeezes money out of the people by selling them an absurd vision of the world in which all is good and divine.Religions are physical slavery; it is a well-built corporation that steals human spirituality in a systematic, fascistic, fashion. The church teaches slave-morality, just like the mass media, just like the Hollywood propaganda.The church is a spiritually bankrupt organization because it treats human beings like customers to whom it sells false, decrepit, hopes. The church stands in the way of salvation by stealing human resources and using them to buy gold, land and stocks. The church uses sophisticated propaganda techniques in order to get the populace to believe that a mythic creature in the sky will save them .The church works to crush the revolutionary spirit by keeping the social peace on a rotting bed of intensifying exploitation.The church twists the meanings of the scriptures in order to sell fraudulent visions of noble kings and kind rich men.The church is an upper class institution; this is why it teaches the working class to withstand suffering inflicted by the rulers.Peace secured through war is an irony accepted by millions of brainwashed human beings.The church wants citizens to forgive their enemies because the church works to protect capitalists from the wrath of the workers.

Richest Pastors In Africa 2012.

NIGERIA TOP TEN MOST RELIGION NATION IN THE PLANET.

NIGERIA TOP TEN MOST CORRUPT NATION IN THE PLANET.

70% OF NIGERIA LIVED BY 2$ A DAY

Bishop David Oyedepo is a Nigerian Preacher, Christian Author, Founder and Presiding Bishop of Winners Chapel known as Living Faith Church World Wide. He is hailed as the wealthiest preacher in Nigeria with a total net worth of $150 million and properties like 4 private jets and homes in the United States and England. After the foundation of the Living Faith Outreach Ministry in 1981, it has evolved to be one of the largest congregations in Africa.

Net worth: $150 million

Ministry/Church: Living Faith World Outreach Ministry, also known as Winners Chapel

Every Sunday, he is hosting three worship services in Faith Tabernacle which has a total capacity of 50,000 people. He is also the founder and owner of the Faith Academy, a high school for the elites, Dominion Publishing House which publishes his books and Covenant University, a top tertiary school in Nigeria.

Chris Oyakhilome.

Net worth: $30 million – $50 million

Church: Believers’ Loveworld Ministries, a.k.a Christ Embassy

With an estimated net worth between $30 million- $50 million, Chris Oyakhilome is one of the richest pastors in the whole of Nigeria. He is a faith healer, a televangelist and founding president of the Christ Embassy which is also known as the Believers’ LoveWorld Inc. He is actively involved in magazines, newspapers, local television station, satellite TV, record label and even real estate. He had been involved in a $35 million laundering case after he was accused of stealing his church funds and transferring it to foreign banks. He denied the accusation which dismissed the case eventually. Currently, Christ Embassy has over 40,000 members, some of which were successful politicians and business executives.

Temitope Joshua

Net worth: $10 million – $15 million

Church: Synagogue Church Of All Nations (SCOAN)

With an estimated net worth of $10 million-$15 million, this Nigerian televangelist, humanitarian, minister and faith healer belongs to the top 5 richest pastors in Nigeria. He is the founder of the Synagogue Church of All Nations, he is considered as the most philanthropic and controversial churchman. Through the years, the church has expanded to Greece, South Africa, Ghana and United Kingdom with over 15,000 worshipers on regular Sunday service. He owns a Christian television network named Emmanuel TV, and for over 3 years, he has given up a total of about $20 million to help a number of causes including healthcare, education and rehabilitation programs for the militants of Niger Delta.

Matthew Ashimolowo

Net worth: $6 million – $10 million

Church: Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC)

With an annual salary over £100,000, Mathew Ashilomowo made it to the 4th richest pastor in Nigeria with an estimated net worth between $6 million-$10,000. Ashilomowo got most of his net worth from the sales of documentaries and Christian literatures in his media company known as Matthew Ashimolowo Media. His programme entitled Winning Ways is aired everyday on Spirit FM (Amsterdam) and Premier Radio (London) and on television in Ghana, Zimbabwe, TV, Africa, Ghana, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and Europe’s The God Channel and Inspirational Work.

Chris Okotie

Net worth: $3 million -$10 million

Church: Household of God Church

Chris Okotie is a popular televangelist and preacher of the Household of God Church International Ministries, he has a total net worth of $3 million to $10 million. He started as a pop musician until he founded the church. He has been a non-winning Nigerian Presidential candidate in the 2003, 2007 and 2011 elections. Currently, his congregation has over 5,000 members composed of Nollywood musicians, celebrities and society people.

http://www.therichest.org/nation/forbes-richest-pastors-in-nigeria/

Malcolm X On Political Maturity

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 22:10:00 +0000

Anytime you throw your weight behind a political party that controls two-thirds of the government, and that Party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election time, and you’re dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that Party, you’re not only a chump, but you’re a traitor to your race.

They try and pass the buck to the Dixiecrats. Now back during the days when you were blind, deaf, and dumb, ignorant, politically immature, naturally you went along with that. But today as your eyes come open, and you develop political maturity, you’re able to see and think for yourself, and you can see that a Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise.

They’ve been down there four years, and they’re — all other legislation they wanted to bring up they brought it up and gotten it out of the way, and now they bring up you. And now, they bring up you. You put them first, and they put you last, ’cause you’re a chump, a political chump.

~Malcolm X

No Nation Can Rise Above The Level Of It's Women."0mowale Malcolm X

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 18:15:00 +0000

"No Nation Can Rise Above The Level Of It's Women."0môwálé, Malcolm X

They experimented on the mental states of our women, it is our duty as men to gain knowledge of our creator and self, so we can restore them.

"The slave maker knew that he couldn't make these people slaves until he first made them DUMB. And one of the best ways to make a man DUMB is to take his tongue, take his language. A man who can't talk, what do they call him? A DUMMY. Once your language is gone, you are a DUMMY. You can't communicate with people who are your relatives, you can never have access to information from your family—you just can't communicate.

Also, if you'll notice, the natural tongue that one speaks is referred to as one's MOTHER TONGUE—MOTHER TONGUE. And the natural intelligence that a person has before he goes to school is called mother wit. Not father wit—it's called MOTHER wit because everything a child knows before it gets to school, it learns from its MOTHER, not its father. And if it never goes to school, whatever native intelligence it has, it got it primarily from its MOTHER, not its father; so it's called mother wit. And the mother is also the one who teaches the child how to speak its language, so that the natural tongue is called the mother tongue. Whenever you find as many people as we who aren't able to speak any mother tongue, why, that's evidence right there something was done to our mother. Something had to have happened to her.

They had laws in those days that made it mandatory for a Black child to be taken from its mother as fast as that child was born. The mother never had a chance to rear it. The child would be brought up somewhere else away from the mother, so that the mother couldn't teach the child what she knew—about itself, about her past, about its heritage. It would have to grow up in complete darkness, knowing nothing about the land where it came from or the people that it came from. Not even about its own mother. There was no relationship between the Black child and its mother; it was against the law. And if the master would ever find any of those children who had any knowledge of its mother tongue, that child was put to death. They had to stamp out the language; they did it scientifically. If they found any one of them that could speak it, off went its head, or they would put it to death, they would kill it, in front of the mother, if necessary. This is history; this is how they took your language. You didn't lose it, it didn't evaporate—they took it with a scientific process, because they knew they had to take it to make you dumb, or into the dummy that you and I now are.

I read in some books where it said that some of the slave mothers would try and get tricky. In order to teach their child, who'd be off in another field somewhere, they themselves would be praying and they'd pray in a loud voice, and in their own language. The child in the distant field would hear his mother's voice, and he'd learn how to pray in the same way; and in learning how to pray, he'd pick up on some of the language. And the master found that this was being done, and immediately he stepped up his efforts to kill all the little children that were benefiting from this. And so it became against the law even for the slave to be caught praying in his tongue, if he knew it. It was against the law. You've heard some of the people say they had to pray with their heads in a bucket. Well, they weren't praying to the Jesus that they're praying to now. The white man will let you call on that Jesus all day long; in fact he'll make it possible for you to call on him. If you were calling on somebody else, then he'd have more fear of it. Your calling on that somebody else in that other language—that causes him a bit of fear, a bit of fright.[...]

For three hundred years we stayed at that level. Finally we got to where we had no language, no history, no name. The white man named us after himself—Jones, Smith, Johnson, Bunche, and names like those. [Laughter] We couldn't speak our own language; we had none. And he then began to teach us that we came from a jungle, where the people had no language. This was the crime that was committed—he convinced us that our people back home were savages and animals in the jungle, and the reason we couldn't talk was because we never had a language. And we grew up thinking that we never had one."

Æmôwálé, Malcolm X

2Pac Gives His Opinion On African and Slave Names (Interview)